The Torture Party: A Summary

Roy reads ’em so you don’t have to. The reactions are depressingly predictable. Goldberg throws out a bizarre non-sequitur. Althouse is unable to comment, because she can’t deploy the high standards of impartiality and intellectual rigor for which she is justly famed–like when she implied that Bill Clinton was lying because she didn’t like his suit. (If you want to know what her post would have looked like, just take one of her recent posts about Project Runway, substitute the names of random Republicans for the nice hot models and of random Democrats for the mean, non-hot models. Throw in a few crucial details: Harry Reid has an ugly tie, Mitch McConnell looks like he’s really lost weight, Maria Cantwell probably wears objectively anti-feminist knit sweaters in her spare time, once shook hands with Bill Clinton and is rumored to have breasts…I’m sure you’d agree that it would be very illuminating.) Eugene Volokh offers some of what Henley aptly described as “bog-standard Republican authoritarianism, Kaye Grogan but in well-turned prose.” Roy reminds us that Volokh supports amending the Constitution to permit torture, but not about how he found the whole subject of torture too unpleasant to discuss when he perceived it as not in the interests of the Republican Party.

But topping them all is Reynolds. You get the defense of torture and arbitrary executive power as long as we define them as not-torture and not-arbitrary executive power, with a little plausible deniablity thrown in. You get his classic approach of blaming people who oppose torture as opposed to those who support it for the legal sanctioning of torture. You get his recycling of Volokh’s fantasy that if we didn’t act our enemies attacking us with….frivolous legal motions! (This really is stretching the Depends Theory of Geopolitics well past the point of self-parody.) You get his inevitable tautological claims that the Democrats are the big political losers in this. (Of course, if every Democrat had voted for it, they’d still be feckless losers who are too weak to be trusted and hence politically doomed. Had they successfully blocked it, they wouldn’t be so much anti-war as on the other side, and hence politically doomed. If Reynolds had been blogging in November 1936, he would have written that it was a catastrophic month for the Democratic Party.) Which I guess is Instapundit’s value to the world: every conceivable nuttily illogical right-wing argument provided in one convenient space.