Ambivalence

Very near the end of the 'torturous' interview of William "The Bloody" Kristol by John Stewart the subject turned to torture. In what was a throw away line by Kristol as the music came up he said "...I'm ambivalent about torture." There was no follow up by John as the segment was ending and I'm not sure Kristol's statement even registered. It registered with me though.

Ambivalence: Simultaneous and contradictory attitudes or feelings (as attraction and repulsion) toward an object, person, or action. Websters Dictionary

So Bill Kristol is ambivalent toward torture! How can one be ambivalent about torture? How can one arrive at such a state of mind as to not care whether a human being is purposely having pain or terror inflicted upon them? One is not ambivalent about torture, one is ambivalent about what effing pair of shoes you're going to wear today, not effing torture.

It's a tacit admission by Kristol that we indeed do torture but we only torture the people we don't really give a shit about because, most likely, they deserve to have a bit of pain inflicted upon them, afterall look what the bastards did to us on 9 effing 11.

It's nice Bill, real classy. Your fear and loathing after 911, your initial desire and continued support for the worst foreign policy initiative this country has ever embroiled itself in and your viscious and vaccuous backing of, quite possibly, the most dangerous and despotic president in US history has brought you to a place where you are no better than the people you feel we should be torturing.

There are some bad people in the world, I think every American and freedom loving soul can agree on that, they should be dealt with by our armed forces, intelligence agencies and police in a manner that befits their crimes and nothing more. They should be shot if participating in acts of violence against us, they should be hunted down, rounded up, tried and imprisoned for conspiracy to commit crimes against us and they should be interrogated whenever the opportunity arises. We have laws that govern every facet of how we prosecute the aforementioned. Nowhere does it say we can torture and why? Because torture is not a means of getting exploitable information, it is a form of sadism designed to provide, to the torturor, the answers he wants to hear in order to incriminate the victim. It has no place in modern interrogation methodology because it is anathema to what intelligence gathering agencies are trying to achieve.

Bill Kristol and his ilk however, want to invent news ways, outside the laws that have governed us for centuries to project our new muscle bound, shock and awesome awesomeness upon the world and they assure us, they will go to any lengths or depths, including using torture as a terror weapon against our enemies, to prove they're not kidding around this time.

Our Congress has just finished debating and passing a bill outlawing waterboarding, which is euphemistic language for modern torture techniques, John McCain, in an outlandish and very unmaverick-like pander to Kristol and his neocon trolls, voted against the motion, this from a man tortured in Vietnam, it's tragic.