In Brief: Things That the Rude Pundit Learned From the Attorney General Yesterday:
1. Just because it's torture for you, doesn't mean it's torture for everyone. See, waterboarding is like tickling in that, for some, tickling is absolute torture. For others, it's pleasurable to the point of sexual excitement. So the measure of what is and is not torture ought not be some objective standard of behavior. Nope - it should be the boner test. If you are getting drowned during an interrogation and you get a hard-on (if you are male), then it's not torture. How would this be determined? Well, that would take some kind of electrodes attached to the genitals of the prisoner.

2. America retains its moral authority in the world because its highest law enforcement officer says that it's wrong to rape prisoners during an interrogation. It's not unakin to saying, "Well, I fucked that corpse, but at least I didn't eat it." We should have bumper stickers that read: "America: We're Not Egypt." After Michael Mukasey said that the law prohibits rape of prisoners, Alabama Republican Jeff Sessions jumped in to say that, if some terrorist had planted a nuke in Dothan, he'd fuck the guy to get the location.

3. Shocking the conscience is a relative thing. Mukasey seemed to imply (since everything he said was coated in a fine goo of legal vagaries and bureaucratic obfuscation) that waterboarding might meet the "shocks the conscience" standard on some occasions, like if it was done for entertainment purposes, but not in others, like if it was done to prevent a mythical chemical attack. So, as a standard, the ends justify the means. Or it's only a crime if nothing good comes of it. Applied in other circumstances - meaning for you - it means that if you rob a rich asshole of his millions and donate all the money to faith-based initiatives, you have done a good thing. If you donate it to Planned Parenthood, your ass is getting dunked.

4. The conversation in the Bush administration is like a meeting of sadists and masochists. Everyone's just getting off on what they can and can't do, and the only ones without a safe word are the ones who have had it done to them.

(Migraine. Brain hurts. More possibly later.)