"We Do Not Torture"
Bush went on to say “Other than people and logic. We torture the shit out of them.”
In a press conference on Friday, George W. Bush continued to demonstrate his belief that stubbornness and narcissism are strong qualities. While I think John Kerry was one of the worst choices the Democrats could have made in Presidential nominee (”If only Al Gore was taller and could scare more children…”), he made a good point in one of the debates when he said “It’s one thing to be certain, but you can be certain and wrong.”
Some Senate Republicans are finding President Bush to be certainly wrong regarding the issue of torture. I agree with them, and I haven’t even been tortured like Sen. John McCain (R-AZ). First, I have trouble believing that torture is the most effective and efficent way of uncovering terror plots. As Chris Penn said in Reservoir Dogs, “If you fucking beat this prick long enough, he’ll tell you he started the goddamn Chicago fire, now that don’t necessarily make it fucking so!”
Second, advocating torture as well as expanded surveillance powers makes you wonder what kind of ass-backwards democracy we’re trying to spread to the world. They don’t hate us because of our money or our religion or our free speech and so forth (although they’re not super fond of those). They hate us because of shit like this. Who wouldn’t? Those who torture rarely come off as the good guys. Unless they’re Jack Bauer.
Also mentioned in the press conference was Bush’s refusal to go and search the nation of Pakistan for Osama Bin Laden. The reason? We can’t go in without an invitation because Pakistan is a soverign nation. Soverign. Meaning “Independent”. Technically what Afghanistan and Iraq were before we invaded (with Afghanistan, rightly so; with Iraq, wrongly so).
But even if we wanted to go in to Pakistan, where would we get the troops? It’s a shame the President never studied basic economics, although I suppose that doesn’t come up a lot when you never have to worry about money. For instance, no one told him that if you increase spending (war) while decreasing revenue (taxes), you will go into debt. Apparently he also missed the lesson about why it’s important to budget a limited supply. You see, we have a limited supply of troops. Mommy and Daddy can’t just give him more when he runs out. That’s why when you use them, you have to make sure that they go to what you really need. If you spend all your money on baseball cards and blow, you won’t have any money for food. Food is more important than baseball cards and blow. While El Presidente may have wanted war with Iraq, we didn’t need to go to war with Iraq. Now we don’t have the power to check out Pakistan, a nation that probably harbors Bin Laden (didn’t we used to have a problem with places that harbored terrorists?) and we don’t have the power for the final issue, Darfur.
Darfur is one of the big issues I care about. I’m not an issue whore. I have lots of opinions, but there’s a short list of social issues where I will continue to put money in the jar until the problem is solved. Darfur is on the short list. Does Darfur pose a threat to us? No. Does Darfur need the help of the largest military in the history of the planet? You bet. Every second that the horrors in Darfur continue is another second where anything we try to say about spreading freedom and democracy is complete and utter bullshit.
http://www.savedarfur.org/
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