"Not Something to Celebrate"

An interesting post by Tom Kreitzburg (creator of the wondrous Reeves and Booster stories):

"Waterboarding Wins": That's how NRO's Marc Thiessen characterizes Scott Brown's electoral win in Massachusetts yesterday. Thiessen writes: As I point out in Courting Disaster, polls show the American people are with us on terrorist interrogation. An April 2009 Pew Poll found that 71 percent of American said there were circumstances in which they would support the use of enhanced interrogation ("torture" they called it, of course, but that makes the number even more stark). The less significant point to make is that the first quoted sentence reiterates the claim that political conservatism in the United States is defined in part by advocacy of torture...The more significant point to make is that Thiessen completely misreads the April 2009 Pew Poll. He thinks the fact that 71% of American think "torture," and not merely "enhanced interrogation," should be safe, legal, and rare is a good sign about what Americans think about what he sees as a position that is part and parcel of political conservatism. In fact, it is a sign that a great majority of Americans are gravely immoral. That the population is morally depraved in a direction that helps your candidates win elections is not something to celebrate.

A point that both parties really need reminding of on a regular basis.