What She Said

Molly Ivins on government torture:

"What are you going to do about this? It's your country, your money, your government. You own this country, you run it, you are the board of directors. They are doing this in your name. The people we elected to public office do what you want them to. Perhaps you should get in touch with them."

Don't blame us at the Blasphemy Blog, for we voted for John Kerry. This is what we would like to be able to say. Unfortunately, we know that this sort of thing would continue to happen no matter who was elected president. John Kerry, great president though we think he would be, would not have put an end to torture practiced by government entities.

Torture is part of the work of the upstanding American lawman.

This is because most Americans are fairly comfortable with torture in the abstract, if it is used on the bad guys as a way of learning the secret location of the bomb terrorists are going to use to destroy Los Angeles. This last scenario has been ably demonstrated in the fine police documentaries Face/Off and 24.

Wait a second…Face/Off was a movie featuring Nicolas Cage and 24 is a TV show! Those are works of fiction! Well, surely we can come up with a non-fictional example of torture revealing information that saved many lives…hmmm…well, we’ll keep working on it.

We at the Blasphemy Blog readily admit that we were on President Palmer’s side when he ordered his evil corporate drone secretary of defense tortured in order to learn where the bomb was located. But our point is that, it is not right for us to feel that way. That way of thinking is perverse and wrong, and we should work against it. We shouldn’t give in to it.

And we should demand that our elected representatives behave the same way. Cue Molly Ivins. She’s right. Our government is us. We’ve got to start making it act like ourselves again.