The incumbent president had the worst approval numbers in the history of them being recorded. That bodes horribly for the candidate running from the same party. It also doesn't help when the country is in an economic collapse that's worse than nearly anyone can remember.
In short, this statement is so far removed from reality it's baffling. The Republicans have almost no shot whatsoever at winning the presidency. It would've taken a dead hooker in the closet at the last moment to defeat whatever Democrat ran.
No telling what it actually is your attempting to argue here. but that's hardly a shock. The country was in no sense in an "economic collapse" when McCain lost to Obama, and even though Bush contributed to the initial poor response, Obama has made a presidential career out of very real economic collapses, which makes sense both because of the economic illiteracy of many in his party, but because economic collapse is itself, a part of his overall governing strategy. He telegraphed this long, long before the election.
Also, the United states isn't located in North America! Yarhg!
Are you lucid, today, Delusion? Here's the definition from the American Heritage Dictionary:
The northern continent of the Western Hemisphere, extending northward from the Colombia-Panama border and including Central America, Mexico, the islands of the Caribbean Sea, the United States, Canada, the Arctic Archipelago, and Greenland.
I can see, ever more, while Daniel Peterson simply gave up talking to you many years ago.
Fortunately for my point, it doesn't matter what sorts of torture you don't consider torture.
Try arguing outside a strict tautological mode of question begging and actually try to construct a logically connected argument that attempts to show something follows from evidence. This would be of immeasurable benefit.
Treaties the US has signed on and played a role in authoring that were pushed by the Reagan administration defined acts the US later engaged in as torture. That includes but is not limited to waterboarding (once known as "the water torture").
Nonsense. The entire thing is legal and was completely vetted legally before it was ever utilized (the vanishingly few times it was). Further, there is no reasonable argument that can be made for calling "torture" something that does no physical damage to the body and causes no lasting harm. Numerous Air Force pilots are waterboarded as a routine aspect of their training as combat aviators. Further, unlike "torture" to extract a confession in a civil criminal case after the fact, or simply to exact revenge, international terrorist operatives and fighters have no rights that any nation is obliged to recognize infer either the Hague or Geneva conventions. They are free floating, globe trotting enemy combatants, and, to paraphrase an old song, "wherever they leave their hat is their home").
They are enemy combatants and, at the same time, non-standard enemy combatants who do not where uniforms of fight for particular nation states who move into your country and start killing civilians. They are warriors and operatives working out of foreign nations (with or without their consent), not civilian criminals.
The only way one can get to a claim that waterboarding is "torture" is through the massaging of various
legal definitions of torture (and relying - the favorite leftist tactic - on definitions outside of U.S. law and jurisprudence) With sufficient intellectual creativity, one can then make going to bed without supper (as American liberals traditionally just love to do when faced with actually dealing with America's enemies, either foreign or domestic and which they have indeed done in the case of Club Gitmo and Abu Ghrab) "torture." This is where the legal standard of "reasonable and necessary" comes into play. While it would never be thought reasonable and necessary to use waterboarding to extract a confession from a gang member for a crime already committed, to to disclose the location of the meth lab, using more intense coercive methods to extract information about clear and present future threats (the planning, financing, and strategy of terrorist plans in progress, the location and composition of an ambush of American soldiers, the rescue of innocents from the clutches of terrorists who will use
real torture and hideous forms of execution (such as beheading) on those innocent victims) is another matter, especially when time is of the essence.
The real problem here, as well, is that, looking over the various defintions of torture that can be found (I've found at least 7), these definitions are so vague, in some aspects, that they leave an aggressor so thoroughly protected against intense interrogation that may be necessary to extract critical information needed to protect innocents from harm (and hideous, horrifying harm) or a nation from grave national security risk (such as 9/11), that it amounts to a bit of a mini-suicide pact for democratic, civilized societies (enemies need not, of course, and frequently do not (like the Viet Cong), pay any attention to things like the Geneva Convention).
Further, the Constitution
does not prohibit anything like waterboarding or the infliction of physical suffering (which waterboarding does not really do) in cases in which there is immanent risk of death/harm to others, especially on a mass scale. One can use physical force (or intense psychological stress, which is waterboarding's effective technique) to protect/defend the innocent, but not to extract a confession or as a purely punitive measure (cruel and unusual punishment).
One must keep in mind that we are
at war (they, in other words, are at war with us) with international terrorism, not in a civilian criminal justice relationship, and the stakes of losing or being outflanked in that war are
extremely serious, indeed.
Your deep, unilateral compassion, empathy, and pseudo-moral concern for the avowed enemies of America, who have vowed its utter destruction by an means necessary, a second Holocaust in Israel, and who would slit the throat of my 10 year old (infidel whore) grand daughter without the slightest compunction or second thought is touching, in a morally mealy, decadent, post-sixties leftist way, but sickening in its overall effect nonetheless.
I'm sorry that waterboarding shocks and traumatizes your highly refined liberal sensitivities so. I think another viewing of the Nicolas Berg beheading is the proper prescription for Eloi such as yourself who have not sufficiently studied, absorbed, or taken seriously the lessons of history or the realities of human nature.
The US has a history of prosecuting under torture laws those who have engaged in it domestically and the US has tried members of other nations for warcrimes for having used it.
Yes, like the Nazis, who used it purely as a instrument of punitive vengeance against innocent civilians. Roll the dice again...
Until it became clear that the US was systematically engaging it in,
Now you're just lying for The Cause, Delusion. How typically and decrepitly left-wing of you.
Sickening.
there was no controversy over whether it constituted torture.
Another bald lie. No one without a deep ideological affinity either for our enemies or against America and American national security (anti-anti-terrorism) no matter who the enemy may be, thinks waterboarding can be reasonably construed as "torture." Intellectually serious, reasonable people do not consider waterboarding "torture," just as no intellectually serious, reasonable people consider 9/11 a criminal act (which is just to point out that only ideologically comitted leftists/secular humanists who believe that the fundamental enemy of humanity is America, and who see all America's enemies, whether communism in the past or Islamic Jihadism at present, as having legitimate grievances, and who see no moral difference between America as a nation and a people, broadly speaking, and anti-democratic, totalitarian/authoritarian, barbarous/honor/blood & soil cultures, societies, and forms of government, who think that waterboarding can be reasonably be construed as "torture," or that, even if it was, it would not be justified for the purposes for which it has been used against the kinds of people it has been used against. It is, in other words, the de facto allies of the Jihadists who seek to subvert and dismantle every attempt America makes to defend itself, at every turn, with relentless gusto. Please do not pretend it is concern for the "morality" of the practice. The Left knows no such concept, and "strong," idolatarian libertarianism do not have the intellectual depth or ethical imagination, in all too many cases, to take the concept "moral" seriously, in any authentic sense).