America 2.0

LA Times:

The Pentagon has decided to omit from new detainee policies a key tenet of the Geneva Convention that explicitly bans "humiliating and degrading treatment," according to knowledgeable military officials, a step that would mark a further, potentially permanent, shift away from strict adherence to international human rights standards.

Obviously, this is yet another outrage in the seemingly never-ending series of them brought to us care of BushCo., but I blame McCain for this one. Sure, there’s his whole laughably impotent anti-torture bill thing, but the real reason I’m laying the responsibility at his feet is because I firmly believe that he has single-handedly convinced BushCo. that the more they humiliate and degrade people, the more those people will love them.


“Thank you, Mr. President, for making political hay of my wife’s addiction to prescription painkillers, for implying that my adopted Bangladeshi daughter is my illegitimate black child, and for starting a whisper campaign that I am mentally unstable after being taken a POW during a war you avoided like it was Helen Thomas with a legitimate question about your personal accountability for your administration’s many failures. I love you deeply, Mr. President. Thank you, sir—may I have another?”

That Arizona sun-dried turd not only gave the architects of a torture policy that finds the Geneva Conventions “quaint” the ability to claim they're really anti-torture by passing a useless bill while they continue to torture people and ever broaden the definitions of acceptable “detainee policy” by redirecting torture methods under its innocuous-sounding umbrella, but has also evidently convinced them that just after the hunger strikes come the hugs.

(Hat tip Fixer.)