I’ve been trying to feel good about the New York Times’ decade-late decision to call torture torture—that is, to “deploy the English language to describe things,” as the Washington Post’s Erik Wemple memorably put it. Obviously, late is better than never, and I don’t see how a reasonable person could possibly quibble with the result here. But the decision’s purported reasoning rendered me partially anhedonic about the result. And this morning, I think I realized why.

The problem is, the Times doesn’t acknowledge that it never should have agreed to adopt the government’s mandated nomenclature—Enhanced Interrogation Techniques—instead of plain English to describe behavior that the Times had always called torture until the Bush administration told them not to. Instead, it explains its reversal essentially by noting there had been a “dispute” about the word torture before, and now there isn’t. So while we get a good result this time, what happens the next time the government alerts the New York Times of the alleged existence of some sort of linguistic “dispute”?

I wrote about a similar phenomenon recently, noting that it made no sense to cheer Obama for “banning” torture. Yes, the result might be good, but the reasoning behind the result undermines the rule of law by implying torture is a policy choice rather than a crime. Results matter… but so do the long-term effects of the reasoning behind them.

Here, that reasoning is problematic and perverse. A few highlights: