Respect the Republican

Today, I found this post from Sebastian Holsclaw's blog. He describes himself as "a conservative writer with a mostly liberal audience" and says he is mostly ok with that but that today he wants to speak directly to his Republican colleagues. I will let him say it.

Torture is wrong. The practice of extraordinary rendition began as a classic Clintonian hairsplitting exercise in the mid 1990s to avoid the clear letter of the laws which prohibit America from using torture. This is the kind of avoidance of the law and ridiculous semantics that we decried when employed by the Clinton adminstration. It has gotten no more attractive just because Bush has decided to continue the program.

We are torturing non-terrorists. Perhaps some people would be willing to torture Al Qaeda members. I'm not one of them, but perhaps some are. The problem with that mindset is that we aren't just torturing Al Qaeda members. It is becoming completely obvious that some of the people being tortured are innocent... That is crazy. There isn't any information we are getting that could possibly justify the torture of innocent people.

I know it's surprising that this is actually news in the closed-loop reality some of the more rabid my-country-right-or-wrong kill-them-all-and-let-God-sort-them-out corners of rightwing thought. Look at the kind of thing Ann Coulter says. However, Holsclaw sets out an excellent argument against torture of anyone by Americans and concludes with a plea to Republicans:

We are in power now. We control both Houses of Congress and we have our people throughout the administration. We don't need to wait for the Democrats to raise this issue. We can't hide behind the worry that exploring our practices is going to get a President elected who is going to retreat from Iraq. We are the party which leads the most powerful country in the world. And lead it we must. President Bush must be shown that the Republican Party is not willing to stand for the perversion of our moral standards. The Republican-controlled Senate and the Republican-controlled House can close the loophole which allows for extraordinary rendition and can loudly reaffirm that torture is not something we do. We are the majority party, and we claim to be a party that cares about the moral health of the nation. We are damning ourselves if we sit back and let it continue.

Respect is due.