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Contributing Editor for Newsweek: Pardon the torturers.

Yeah, I really wish I was making that up.

Via Sadly, No! comes the distrurbing opinion that, in order to get the truth about all this torture stuff, Bush should just pardon everyone involved so they could feel free to speak without having their lives inconvenienced with things like “investigations” and “court dates.”

The whole piece reads like some odd sort of sketch comedy script, where they were going for humor and instead crashed headfirst into a big pile of Stupid.

How would pardoning people who engaged in and ordered torture going to improve our world image? How would that ensure we get to the truth of the matter, a truth that pretty much everyone in the Ruling Class and The Village seems desperate to avoid?

I’m just stunned that this sort of thing is even being seriously discussed. Our country tortured people, and we’re talking about ways to excuse that behavior and brush it off as partisanship.

Loss of innocence

I don’t remember exactly what day it was. It was sometime after Bush got re-elected, sometime before the Democratic take-over of the Senate. To better help you cast the scene in the all-seeing eye of your mind, let’s call it December of ’05. That was when I lost that youthful exuberance, the perpetual flush of happiness that pretty much all Americans have at some point in their lives.

It was then that I finally succumbed to the pressures from someone very close to me, and I joined DailyKos.

She had been trying to get me involved in politics for a long time at that point. I never saw the purpose, never really wanted to know more than what I saw from the TV. I was a self-described Republican, happy Bush got re-elected, questioning Kerry’s Vietnam credentials, and generally clueless as to the state of our country.

It was odd; I supported women’s rights to choose, gay marriage, Affirmative Action, had all the usual liberal positions on all the policies. I think I was afraid of the word “liberal” at the time, buying into all the crap fed to us from the traditional media and blowhards on the radio and on cable “news” shows. But that’s neither here nor there.

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