...to turn a one-in-a-million emergency exception into the rule, and to pretend that we need to know any more specific details to know that waterboarding is both torture and plainly illegal is to turn the rule of law on its head. The notion that you have to explicitly make waterboarding illegal - or even more absurdly that if the Congress hasn't done so, it has essentially accepted the legality of waterboarding - is a little like saying that the law against murder doesn't apply to someone who suffocated someone with a pillow, because that particular method hasn't been specifically outlawed.Murder is murder. Torture is torture. The latter is the application of any "severe mental or physical pain or suffering" to force an individual to say what he otherwise might not say in captivity. The point is the coercion - however it is applied. It is illegal and unconstitutional - and that applies not just to waterboarding but to any such tactic that has that effect. To give the president the power to order this against the law as a routine matter and to declare that s/he has that power permanently and with respect to anyone is tyranny.
But then, from the same post, this:
The last time I checked, conservatism is not a defense of tyranny. It is a defense of the Anglo-American tradition of freedom that this president and the current GOP have been abusing for six years. Conservatism must now mean resisting this president's abuse of power, not enabling it.
Actually, traditional conservatism is a defense of authority and tradition. Liberalism, by contrast, was an attack on those things in the name of preventing tyranny. It is liberalism that historically stood in opposition to tyranny, not conservatism. Given how badly mangled the meanings of these words have become, this is no small point.
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