Andrew Sullivan seems to have an unwritten rule that every time he posts something thoughtful and informative, he has to balance it out with something outrageously wrong. (Sadly, it doesn't work the other way around.) So a very good post about torture, shredding the Bush administration's excuses therefor, is followed by an exercise in wishful thinking in which he suggests that the anti-torture faction within the administration is gaining the upper hand. That may well be factually correct, but all it means is that people who were perfectly comfortable with covert torture are less comfortable defending it in the open. (Gotta give Cheney credit for sticking up for his values, no matter how odious they are.)
But that's not the part of the post that elevated my blood pressure. What got to me was this quote:
Those of us who recall the Reagan legacy and who believe in America's vital role in fighting terror while preserving its values of...human rights are finally gaining ground.In Nicaragua, the Reagan administration backed a rebel army, composed largely of officers from Somoza's notoriously brutal National Guard, that engaged in the indiscriminate slaughter of rural civilians. The aim was to bring down a government that, while comically inept, was less repressive than most Latin American regimes at the time.
In El Salvador, the Reagan administration backed the scorched-earth campaign of death squad puppeteer Roberto d'Aubuisson. Again, indiscriminate slaughter of rural civilians.
In Guatemala, the Reagan administration was extremely cozy with President Efrain Rios Montt, the most brutal of a long line of military tyrants, who was responsible for tens of thousands of civilian deaths in Guatemala's dirty war. Again, indiscriminate slaughter of civiilians in the service of American interests.
Now, I'll confess that every now and then I feel a twinge of nostalgia for Reagan. If Sully's point is that Bush is worse than Reagan, I'll happily concede that. Far worse. These ratfuckers are wackier than Reagan, more vindictive than Nixon, more corrupt than Harding or Grant, worse than the lot of them put together.
But none of that should obscure the fact that putting 'Reagan' in the same sentence as 'human rights' is an atrocity against truth, basic decency, and the English language. The Reagan legacy is what the Bush people have taken as a jumping-off point, and only a terminal amnesiac could pretend that the current atrocities are anything other than a continuation of the same philosophy taken to grotesque and horrible extremes.
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