I read conservative blogs so you don’t have to

(UPDATE: See below for details.)

I write a post about reverse torture porn and not a day later we learn Christopher Hitchens waterboarded himself. Coincidence? Of course it is. But we can use the conservative commentary on Hitchens to test my, um, pornographic thesis. We begin, as you do, with Michelle Malkin:

I can see agreeing to waterboarding for an article like the one Hitchens was writing.

I believe Mrs. Sade and Sacher-Masoch could weigh in here, but I’ll skip the overtly randy stuff in favor of the more substantial material produced by her commenters. To wit:

The question will always be, and there really is no avoiding it until we develop a true mind-reading technology: is our moral revulsion against torture justified that when weighed against the possible number of deaths we can avoid by using it, we will always argue against its use? [...] But what if the object in question we are seeking is a nuclear bomb hidden in our city? Suddenly we are on the receiving end of the blast and the calculus changes drastically.

You can’t lead those horses into these waters any faster.  See?

The enemy believes that we are weak, & Hitchens & his ilk are to blame. It will come to a point, & soon me thinks, when real force will be required. And then it shall come to pass that the unpleasant realities of preemption need to be replaced with the even more unpleasant realities of vengeance […] & the Hitchens of the world will cease to be relevant.

You have to love the Old Testament rhetoric of what is, really, Frank Castle fury.  This commenter wants the day to come to pass when on thee and thou with His flesh-hooks rains carbuncle distemper and harrows everyone who has ever disagreed with him ever. The only way to prevent — if that’s your bag, which clearly it isn’t some people’s — this disaster? Torture fantasies:

[T]hose photos may have showed what looked to be electrodes […] no current was passed through, nor is there any evidence of same [...] and I don’t care if appearances are shocking to the “sensitive” eyes of the all caring [liberals].

How many times has he rehearsed this bit? Stripping down the prisoner, rudely affixing the electrodes to his genitals, coyly fiddling the switch, &c. How are we not in the realm of fantasy when people affirm, on the basis of a picture, whether a current has ever passed through wires? (Short of “still in the plastic,” I mean.) But I’m meant to connect these apocalyptic fantasies and the sexualized means of their avoidance to John McCain, aren’t I? As luck would have it, someone beat me to the punch:

Debating that waterboarding is torture, when we have seen the depravity and cruelty displayed by our enemy, is just plain stupidity. Waterboarding, as a means of extracting vital information regarding our security is not torture, it is a means to an end and that means, whilst it may give some terrorist — who by the way, is hell-bent on our destruction — a few heart palpitations, and even may, gasp, feel he is drowning, he will be none the worse for his experience. Unlike John McCain, who cannot raise his arms above his shoulders, due to his injuries.

I am so glad I am not a liberal woman. Who could be attracted to these weak-kneed, ineffectual wussies who get limp at the thought of how awful these nasty Americans are for waterboarding.

Who loves SAT analogies?  I love SAT analogies!  But this one is really tough, so I’ll need you to help me out.  At the thought of torture:

liberal : limp :: conservative : ____

Granted, this commenter wouldn’t have scored 800 anyway, what with “A is not torture because B and C are worse” passing for logic to her mind.

All of which isn’t to say that some people aren’t still satisfied with the role of torturer — “IF THAT MAKES YOU HOT SEE THIS! — only that it seems the McCain candidacy compels more than a few people to diversify their libidinal investments.  (In more ways than they think.)

UPDATE: This comment concerning the war crimes prosecution of Japanese for waterboarding must be shared:

[T]he Japanese were considered war criminals, you effing morons, not for the act of waterboarding but for torturing to the point of drowning, and then going all the way and drowning or otherwise killing the prisoners.

We, OTOH, try to scare the carp out of the person being interrogated by giving him the sensation of, and the fear of, being drowned.

But how, pray tell, did it get in there?

Comments

[J Wood]

Thanks for the due diligence. I just had a long discussion about this sort of thing with a generally militant-minded individual who has never lived in the U.S., and can be swayed by logic. We came to the conclusion that A.) If one were a terrorist and B.) one's goal was to make sure the conservative pipe dream of a ticking bomb actually blew up, causing no end of material and social damage, and C.) like Malkin and others suggest, the terrorist cares nothing for his life or the life of others, then D.) it would actually be easier for the terrorist to accomplish his goal.

Here's how we came to that conclusion:

Start with our hypothetical terrorist, comprised out of the darkest reaches of the rightest-wing imagination. He has one bloodthirsty goal that makes his eyes glaze over -- blow shit up in the U.S., taking out as many civilians in the offing, all in the effort to force the U.S. to dismantle its own constitution and ruin its financial sector in order to bring down the country. If that's our terrorist -- and we have no evidence from the likes of Malkin, Cheney, Pipes, et. al., who can't even differentiate between a terrorist and insurgent, to assume otherwise -- then that terrorist's life is secondary to accomplishing the goal.

So say that terrorist does manage to plant the bomb in, say, the Rose Bowl (because he came up via Tijuana, of course, masquerading as a Mexican immigrant laborer). And somehow he's caught, and somehow his captors know he's planted that bomb. So they start to beat him with phone books, pipes, ram untwisted paper clips under his fingernails, etc. They enact a mind-numbing smörgåsbord of pain upon this presumed individual. But they've already made an error, because they've shifted from thinking that this terrorist will stop at nothing to make sure his evil plans come to fruition to the idea that self-preservation will reign supreme.

No doubt that terrorist, if he did manage to get a thermonuclear weapon planted in some public place without being seen, is not all that stupid. If that terrorist's goal is to make sure the bomb goes off no matter what, and if that terrorist finds torture uncomfortable, and that terrorist isn't completely stupid, that terrorist does tell them everything, in all kinds of sincere detail. But it's all the wrong stuff. Instead of sending his torturers to the Rose Bowl, he sends them to the Hollywood Bowl, with no end of detail about where the bomb is. In fact, since he's evil enough to get a real thermonuclear weapon planted in the Rose Bowl, he or his cohorts were also evil enough to plant a dummy bomb in the Hollywood Bowl, right where he sends the torturers.

By the time the torturers get to the dummy bomb, and think that their torture worked -- that vengeance proved the weak-kneed, weak-minded liberals wrong -- BLAMMO -- the real bomb goes off, L.A. is a smoldering hole, and the terrorist doesn't care what happens next, because the goal was accomplished.

In fact, a smart terrorist would bank on torturers turning to torture before anything else. Terrorist jujitsu 101 -- use the opposition's strength against them.

All which leads me to the conclusion that not all of the pro-torture conservatives are that thick, and someone must of worked through the calculus. So is torture really about threatening and attacking terrorists? Or is it really about tightening a choke-hold over the imagination and consciousness of the citizenry in the effort of apocalyptic dominance over the U.S. political and social scene?

(Missed your talk at the ACLA in Long Beach -- looked like a good one.)

[adjunct whore]

the Hitchens piece drove me insane!!! mr. whore forced me to watch it even though i went screaming and kicking. it so pisses me off--too angry to articulate right now.

argh