do you mean it was torture for you to WATCH teh CNN, Fox News….

I saw an anchor from Fox News or CNN or somesuch volunteer to undergo waterboarding, and he came to the exact opposite conclusion from Hitchens.

I saw Fox News or CNN or somesuch.

It was torture.

I guess these doughty anchorpersons insisted that their “enhanced interrogators” not stop the “experiment” even if they begged them to.

Please, SL, check in with reality every now and then.

…

Terry: “My point wasn’t that Chris Hitchens needs to make peace with the Clinton, but that the Clintons are sliding into political irrelevancy.”

Really? Ya think?

“This will be the case even if Obama loses the 08 election, as the ‘Clinton model’ that dominated the Democratic Party from the late 80s to now will not be resurrected.”

Hmmm, the smart money sez the Democratic Party itself is not the same critter it was in the late 80s.

My own highly suspect and HP-Lovecraftian prediction is that both the GOP and the Dems, as parties, are headed for the scrap heap. Look for new party re-alignments in this century.

“But doth suffer a sea change,
Into something
Rich and strange…”

Hark now I hear them, ding-dong, bell.

His greatest weakness as a writer is his need to put himself at the center of attention, to win every argument, to walk away from every encounter in prose, as in life, having gotten the better of someone else. And yet the same impulse is essential to his ambition and power as an essayist. Hitchens is working, consciously, I think, in the tradition of the English essay, descended from Johnson, Lamb, Hazlitt, and Orwell, in which ideas are the flower of direct experience and everything depends on the strong presence of the “I.” Hitchens’s limitation in this form is his inability, maybe unwillingness, to make literature out of the most interesting kind of argument which happens with oneself.

“Next week: Hitchens listens to Vogon poetry!”

Thank you!

It seems she “swallowed less than a cup [of water]”. Abu Ghraib: compare and contrast. Australian officers ordered it cease. Reporters were outside the tent, didn’t actually see what was done to her.

Big brouhaha in Australia over it. My guess is that her gender would have been a factor in the general disgust.

cheerio

He had the chance to stop it with a safe word, and he only changed his tune on whether or not it was torture after he experienced it. He’s one of the real empathic intellects of our time, isn’t he?

Next week: Hitchens listens to Vogon poetry!

Where do I sign?!

Remember when Sour Ole Chris’ puss used to pop up just about every time we turned on a major news channel? Whether you agree or disagree with waterboarding, it’s clear Hitchens has now resorted to a publicity stunt to resurrect his tanking career after his seminal debacle, God is Not Great.

I read the atheist manifesto cover to cover. What stuck out the most in my mind was his assertion that our founding fathers intentionally left God out of our nation’s original political fabric. This is a lie. I quote from that shot across the bow of the British, the Declaration of Independence:

“When in the course of human events it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve political bands which have connected them with another, and assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal status to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.
“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness…
“We, therefore, the Representatives of the United States of America, in General Congress, Assembled, appealing to the Supreme Judge of the world for the rectitude of our intentions, do, in the name, and by the Authority of the good People of these Colonies, solomnly publish and declare, that these United Colonies are, and of Right ought to be, Free and Independent States…”
Jefferson, the man who brought us this God-filled message of freedom, may well have toasted to his final declarative words, “…our sacred Honor.”, with a glass of Virginia’s finest. As a citizen of the United States, I will raise a glass to the consecrated Honor that is ours and to the assurances proclaimed by our nation’s framers.
Happy Forth of July, Sour Ole Chris, wherever you are!

George Kotarides, Jr
Author: A Day in God’s Country

Not torture! Not even punishment! Lol.

I disagree. Is is only because they DON’T believe it IS heinous that they do line up to give it a go.

If it were something they could believe was painful and horrible then no way in the world would they be volunteering to do it.

just askin’

The Yanks aren’t the only ones who resort to dodgy practices.

just sayin’

McCain had his elbows tied together etc for days on end. But you think waterboarding isn’t carried out for hours and intermittently days/weeks/months on end? Of course it is.

Prolonged waterboarding causes serious permanent physical damage - it’s no different to the McCain example you used.

The CIA have banned it. The Pentagon have banned it. The FBI apparently don’t use it. The UN have declared it abhorrent and hypocritical. It breaches international human rights law.

It happens at Guantanamo Bay.