Glenn Greenwald cites a Pew
poll and
takes up where we left off in
Republican the 13th, Part 2:
Note that majorities of white Christians want to torture not merely actual terrorists, but they also want to torture "terrorist suspects" as well, i.e., a group that almost certainly includes perfectly innocent people.
And majorities of white Christians -- Catholics, evangelicals and protestants -- believe in torture not merely in the improbable-in-the-extreme "ticking time bomb" scenario; rather, they believe in torture as a matter of course (i.e., more than "rarely" -- either "often or "sometimes").
No, Viginia, it's not
Father O'Malley's church anymore.
Wow. That's just the most depressing thing I've seen in a long time.
ReplyDeleteHere's a question: how much of this can we blame on all the idiot pundits who keep repeating the "ticking time bomb" canard? The scenario is not only a load of crap in itself; the constant repetition of it seems to be recasting torture in a general sense as something more like Jack Bauer finding the nuke than the sick, tawdry, pointless affair it actually is.
Seriously, next person I hear framing torture in the time-bomb hypothesis gets waterboarded but good.
Repeating things over and over to "catapult the propaganda" is one of their most useful tools. It doesn't have to make sense. It doesn't have to be factual. It doesn't have to be moral. Ask Dick Cheney about Iraq and al Qaeda, WMDs, the meeting in Prague, etc.
ReplyDeleteA thread on MyDD yesterday took up new RNCC ads now running in targeted districts. I commented in part:
These ads aren't about making sense. They're about letting repetition do the work for them over time: drip, drip, drip, as in Chinese water torture, as in the the Colorado cutting the Grand Canyon. All it takes is time and repetition. That's why they're starting early. People will internalize the negative message whether or not they think the ads make sense. It's not a conscious process. The GOP knows that.
Saddam - Osama. Iraq - al Qaeda. Saddam - 9/11.
They're doing what they think works. I'm in Shuler's district and the US Chamber (Coalition for a Democratic Workplace) is still running negative ads about his support for the "card check" bill long after it passed the House. Same thing.
Support for torture? Same thing.
What I hear from most Democrats is impotent complaints. Instead, we have to go on the offensive, neuter their messaging as much as possible and get out our own. The longer we leave the messaging world to them, the more we get beaten down. I say fight back.