The Worst Kind of Apologists

I can’t really add anything else, but this Poor Man takedown of the hapless Charles Bird really deserves emphasis. If there’s anything worse than people who rationalize torture, it’s those who pretend to be opposed to torture but express unwavering support for its political supporters and unwavering contempt for its opponents:

Like with Sebastian Holsclaw’s greatly lauded and utterly vapid essay, Bird’s post appears to address a situation in some alternate universe where Republicans have not been in charge of the government at every single stage of this long-standing torture saga, where every single person involved in drafting the Administration’s torture policies is not a Bush appointee serving at the pleasure of President Bush, and where a archipelago of illegal torture facilities is somehow explained by some unfortunate catalatic confluence of bad apples. And like Holsclaw, he makes a great show of his broad-minded acceptance of facts that have been obvious to normal people for a year. However, unlike Holsclaw, Bird quite clearly doesn’t particularly care that his government has set up the greatest challenge to liberal human rights since the Soviet Union. The only identifiable villians I can find in Bird’s piece are Amnesty International and liberals, and the only people who appear to deserve any sympathy are President Bush and his Republican supporters, who are suffering politically from the policies they themselves have created and supported. And his proposal for dealing with the issue is to have President Bush set up a commission to investigate what the people who he is ultimately responsible for directing and managing are doing, in order to “remov[e] the appearance” that there is something wrong. The reason for this is that Charles Bird is a coward, a fool, a supporter of torture, and a moral imbecile of the sort which seems to think that there is no greater calling than being a Bush apparatchik.

[…]

And so it goes with Mr. Bird. The reality of torture is obviously of zero actual interest to him – if it was, why propose a “solution” which has no power to get at anyone who would actually have the power to set up this American gulag, and no power to make it stop? No, Bird, like the rest of the moral degenerates who are the postmodern Republican party, is fundamentally only concerned with words, appearances, and the power both can wield. Bird is upset because Amnesty’s use of the word “gulag” in reference to Republican policies weakens the Republican party, a group that cares nothing for human rights, only power, and has substantially strengthened Amnesty, a group that cares only about exposing powerful violators of human rights, and no fear of making enemies, with a decades-long record to back it up. He responds with some pitiful proposal designed to deflect criticism of his party’s use of torture, to create the appearance that he gives a shit, but, reality being what it is, forces him to acknowledge a few of the unavoidable and undesputable facts of the matter (but, lacking the delicate touch of an A-list right-wing hack, further exposes him as a delusional, deceitful coward.) But, by forcing him and his fellow travelers to inch closer to the reality they have created, they have inched closer to a point where their torture-enabling position is no longer tenable, and inches all of us closer to the day when this outrageous and humiliating chapter in American history is brought to a close. Maybe that’s what’s really important.

Indeed. This form of apologism is familar, and particularly dreary. Blaming opponents with no power for the bad policies of people you support politically is straight out of the George Wallace playbook. People who make these arguments are far worse than the John Yoos who support torture unequivocally, because they mask their fundamental acceptance of the same policies behind a facade of phony moral concern. Ugh.