a rare combination of stupidity, incompetence and bone-headed arrogance

* billmon:

"It takes a rare combination of stupidity, incompetence and bone-headed arrogance to make Saddam's murderous regime look benign by comparison. But that's what the American reign of error in Iraq has managed to accomplish. Instead of an end to terror, Bush and his merry band of neocolonialists have unleashed a terror without end.

Even if Shrub's motives were as virtuous as his hagiographers insist, at what point do recklessness and fecklessness, and a petulant refusal to admit -- much less learn from -- even the most disastrous mistakes, become forms of evil in themselves?"

* billclinton via jeralyn:

"In an interview with National Public Radio aired on Thursday, Clinton said any decision to use harsh treatment in interrogating suspects should be subject to court review. "You don't need blanket advance approval for blanket torture," Clinton said.
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"The president says he's just trying to get the rules clear about how far the CIA can go when they're when they whacking these people around in these secret prisons," Clinton said in NPR's "Morning Edition" interview, recorded on Wednesday.

"If you go around passing laws that legitimize a violation of the Geneva Convention and institutionalize what happened at Abu Ghraib or Guantanamo, we're going to be in real trouble," he said."

* glenn:

"What we have, then, is a fantasyland debate. Most Americans oppose torture and oppose repudiation of the Geneva Conventions. And Bush administration officials are aggressively advocating both. But they deny that they are doing so, claiming they use only "alternative interrogation techniques" that fall short of torture and they are merely seeking "clarification," not repudiation, of the Conventions.

The media largely adopts those terms to describe the debate. Hence, Democrats become afraid to oppose a widely unpopular policy."

* glenn:

"So how to explain that 31 percent of Americans continue to believe in a patent falsehood regarding a critical matter -- namely, whether the leader of the country that we invaded was responsible for the 9/11 attacks on the United States? What does it say about the potency of the Bush administration's propaganda abilities that this myth was believed by so many Americans in the first place, and that it still endures quite vibrantly? And is there any more potent evidence of the profound failure of the American media to fulfill its central function of informing the citizenry and exposing government falsehoods than the fact that America went to war while most of the country believed this fiction, and that almost one-third of Americans continue to believe it? Regardless of one's ideological orientation, shouldn't it be considered highly disturbing -- to put it mildly -- that such a large percentage of the electorate believes in rank fiction with regard to such critical matters?"