DangerousTalk

It isn’t quite the Clinton question of what is the meaning of the word “is,” but what is torture is pretty straight forward. Herman Cain said it best when he said, “I do not agree with torture… period. However, I will trust in the judgment of our military leaders to determine what is torture and what is not torture.” When asked the obvious follow-up if waterboarding is torture, Cain said that it wasn’t and the crowd went wild. Michele Bachmann then supported waterboarding and got even more cheers.

In fairness, Ron Paul got some cheering for arguing against torture, but we should keep in mind that Ron Paul supporters will cheer at anything Ron Paul has to say.

It used to be that torture was universally acknowledged as a bad thing. But the Republican Party of today doesn’t seem to think so. In fact, many religious believers in particular don’t seem to think so. A study done a few years ago showed that the more religious someone claimed to be correlates to the greater the likelihood that they would support torture. Conversely, atheists were the least likely to support torture.

What will the Republican Party advocate for next? Rape? The question is, has the Republican Party hit a moral bottom. Not long ago they cheered people dying from no health insurance and booed a United States soldier for being openly gay. At this point, if someone told me that the Republicans cheered the cannibalism of babies, I wouldn’t really be surprised.

Getting back to the original point, if waterboarding isn’t torture, then what the fuck is torture? Let’s waterboard these candidates and see if they think it is torture then. A few years ago and right-wing radio host set out to prove that waterboarding wasn’t torture by being waterboarded. It was probably the only case in which torture yielded some useful information. He realized that waterboarding was torture!

Related articles

• Obama: Waterboarding Is ‘Torture’ (huffingtonpost.com)
• GOP Debate Audience Cheers Waterboarding (crooksandliars.com)
• Cain, Bachmann want to reinstate waterboarding (seattletimes.nwsource.com)

Filed under: Current Events, debate, Election, morality, Politics, torture