There's a whole bunch of people who just can't seem to make up their minds about whether or not waterboarding constitutes torture. In case you haven't been paying attention during the Bush reign, waterboarding is that practice of strapping a person to a board, then tilting said person in such a way that his feet are higher than his head, then forcing water down his throat and up his nostrils, producing a complete sense of powerlessness, panic, and impending doom. Theoretically, the person being doused half to death is a terrorist, one who can, literally in this case, cough up info that will save lives of the sort of good people who are torturing him, but in reality there is often only the faintest suspicion these people so reluctantly engaging in water sports activities with their interrogators have any affiliation with terrrorism at all, or that they know anything worth knowing.

Nonetheless, the idea is that doing stuff like half drowning people will motivate them to tell you things. And, in a general sense, it works, with most waterboardees splashing and spluttering out just about anything their superhydrators want to hear, true or not. After all, if people are blindfolding you, then forcing water into and throughout your respiratory system, wouldn't you be inclined to get creative, and tell them just about anything your anxious mind could contrive in order to get them to stop with the water, already, before you were dead.

Lots of the people who can't make up their minds about whether waterboarding constitutes torture are in the State Department, others are in the White House, and still others are in the Pentagon and the CIA. President Bush, the "Decider," has decided that waterboarding isn't torture, exactly, and besides, we're probably not doing it, anyway. Now Bush wants to replace his former Attorney General with yet another person who just can't quite see the harm in waterboarding, replacing the clueless Alberto Gonzales with yet another man who is fuzzy on the concept of just what constitutes torture, and what doesn't. The new guy's name is Mukasey and, like Gonzales and other Bush appointees, he is old-fashioned in his views about things like the Geneva Convention, finding lots of civilized attitudes "quaint," and offering up lots of opinion to justify the use of things civilized Americans once rebuked as uncivilized, and unworthy of a nation founded on the protections of our legal system.

Mukasey, the new guy Bush wants to put in Gonzo's old post, is a judge, though when it comes to judging a simple thing like whether being mean with water constitutes torture, this new Attorney-General nominee just can't work up an opinion. He finds it too hard to make up his mind on the issue, hard to judge whether waterboarding is torture. It's a conundrum he just can't work out, and a decision on the matter eludes him, though making judgments is kinda what most people thought judges did, as a matter of course.

Rushing to his defense, President Bush argued that it was unfair to ask the guy to render an opinion on this matter because, after all, trying to determine in advance how a guy who is going to administer justice in the top legal post in the nation just ain't fair. That was Bush's word~"unfair." For those who thought Bush has been playing rather fast and loose with ideas of fairness during his administration, it's encouraging to see that he's concerned about the concept, and that he now finds it unfair that those charged with overseeing who gets appointed to high office in our government are actually asking questions about what kind of attitudes such people would bring to their work.

We can't have that, of course. It would be like trying to determine in interviews how a potential employee might function in a job he or she was applying for, and, according to the President of These Not-Terribly-United States, doing that sort of thing just ain't fair. Try telling that to the next "human resources" type you're facing across a desk in a pre-employment interview, and then cite the nation's chief executive as your authority.

For most of the people who just can't decide what is torture and what ain't, if it isn't done in a medieval dungeon and doesn't involve red-hot pokers and eyeballs, it's probably just heavy teasing. If it wasn't equal to what they'd seen in one of the SAW movies, it's probably not torture, and probably no worse than frat-boy hazing rituals. Fraternity hazings. That's how ol' Rush Limbaugh defined waterboarding and lots of the other techniques currently being used by our intelligence gatherers, though the not-so-funny part is how we cannot admit we're using such techniques because that would help the enemy prepare for the tortures we're not employing against them. Really, we're not. Except when we are.

Anyway, ol' Rush Limbaugh, the guy who is so pain-averse he got himself addicted to the painkiller Oxycontin, just can't find anything wrong with causing pain and suffering to others if it holds out even illusory promise of keeping us safer. Given his sensitivity to pain and discomfort, you'd think Limbaugh would be just a mite more pecky in his attittude about causing pain to others, but one of the identifying characteristics of the remaining Bush supporters these days is that there's always a double standard. What applies to them does not necessarily apply to others, things like tax breaks, and sacrifice, and judgmental attitudes toward other people's lifestyle choices that often turn out to be utterly hypocritical.

Core support for Bush administration torture policy tends to be found in the evangelical movement, those "Christian" fundamentalists who have redefined what Christianity means all over again, whisking it back to those merry days of old when people like Torquemada and other inquisitors had ways of sorting out just who was a heretic and who wasn't. So, by God, if burning people and dunking other people in ponds to determine whether not they were practicing witches was good enough for our Christian forefathers, then using water as an agent of sorting our the terrorists is certainly good enough for the Bush & Cheney-style Christians and other contemporary crusaders.

So, onward Christian soldiers. Keep up the good work, ye masked interrogators who are, even as I type these words, receiving those prisoners who are being treated to an all-expense-paid vacation to some Third World holding facility for people we want to detain and dunk awhile, all innocently and for good purposes, free of the taint that anything of this kind might be misconstrued as torture because, hell, even judges can't make up their minds about whether drowning simulations are bad or not.

And, to you detainees, just kick back on your little slab of wood provided by the U.S. government, and prepare to gurgle happily, secure in the knowledge that what's happening to you really ain't so bad, at least as defined by those who can't really decide whether or not it's bad at all.

And God Bless America. May the Prince of Peace bless all our efforts to eradicate infidels, and may our critics come to recognize that the water we're pouring down the gullets of those who might know something we want to know is, in the truest sense of the word, holy water, the kind of water Jesus Himself might have used to bless His flock in order to defend the faith, and keep the mean ol' wolves at bay.

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