Center for Advanced Sarcasm

...aren't you really thanking Him for not depriving you of something that He's deprived so many others of?

...most conservatives, even if they don't particularly like him, at least seem do understand why others do. Conservatives will usually admit that Obama is "charasmatic" or agree that he can deliver great speeches.

Erik Prince, the founder and President of Blackwater USA (now "Xe" or something like that), pulled a John Edwards a few years back: his wife had cancer, so he started an affair with and knocked up another woman. Prince's mistress actually attended his wife's funeral and they were married shortly later. No word on whether the Dave Matthews Band was invited to play at the wedding.

Think about it. We have, as a civilization, figured out how to feed, clothe, and shelter everybody. We provide everybody with basic medical care. We've learned how to provide people with ways to transport themselves and their property and communicate with one another despite vast geographic distances. We'd pretty much solved all the basic problems of life by the 1950's. The next 50 years a least we had an enemy that we needed to defend ourselves from - that tends to keep you busy. But now, there's no real enemy either. 9/11 is the best they've got? So America is like "so now what?" We're bored, and idle hands are the devil's playthings...

First off, let me state that I do actually agree with my liberal friends that universial health care, or more specifically a single-payer system, would in fact help many people. No doubt it would allow those without much money to get proper health care, which would allow them to become more productive citizens and actually become less dependant on welfare and other forms of public assistance. It would also prevent the all-too-common scenario where a person with health coverage falls ill and finds that his insurance is inadequate or that high copays and deduciatables drive him into financial ruin. Even for those who are healthy, having insurance handled by the government would free people from dependency on their employer and allow them to seek out new jobs or even strike out on their own without the fear of going bankrupt in the case of injury or illness.

It is time, my brothers.

...from Dan Tarrant. Love the name.

...has been a good one for our society. If nothing else, it shows that we’re finally able to self-reflect again after years of generally being self-defensive. And unlike many of these debates, there are more than two vantage points given consideration: torture is wrong, torture doesn’t work, torture is a necessary evil, what we do is not really torture, and so forth.

At this juncture, however, the cases have been made for each of the various perspectives on the issue and it’s time for our nation to make its choice: to torture or not to torture?

If we decide that we’re not going to torture, then we’ve got to go all the way and stop using any interrogation technique that could be construed as torture by others. No more pushing the envelope with things like waterboarding and stress positions. Whether or not individual Americans think these practices constitute torture is irrelevant since clearly many people across the globe do (and there’s no doubt we’d consider them to be torture if done to our soldiers). We probably will even need to take the position that if our non-torture policy means that terrorists will have an easier time attacking us, then so be it. Nobody said doing the right thing was painless.

On the other hand, if we’re going to approve of using torture to obtain intelligence then we need to be honest about it. We should let it be known that any enemy of the United States may be subject to any treatment deemed necessary to glean information that will help us. Torture and war go hand-in-hand, and if we’re going to wage war against terror then we might as well be committed to it. Any time you wage war you’re suspending your sense of morality to begin with, and often times in war the side that is most committed and most ruthless is the one that wins.

The only other option is to continue with our lukewarm acceptance of torture as long as it’s not too gory and generally kept off the official record. But denial and rationalization are never healthy for individuals or societies.