Meet Your Attorney General To-Be

Alberto Gonzales. To see him and hear him talk, it's hard not to like him. He's got that great Hispanic Texas accent that's so easy on the ears.

But then if you actually LISTEN to what he's said, you can quickly find reasons not to like him. He signed off on only defining torture as that which causes organ failure or death. Vermont Senator Pat Leahy noted that you could cut someone's fingers off and cause neither organ failure or death, but that would NOT by the Gonzales' memo standard be torture. Breaking someone's leg wouldn't cause death or organs to fail. You could pull off every toe nail and fingernail, and by Gonzales' definition, still not be torturing anyone.

Hello??

I think this bears repeating: Legal minds at the highest levels of our government approved coercive interrogation techniques which only drew the line at acts that would cause organ failure or death. What's it take to make a liver fail? A knife stuck in it? A club landing a direct and home-run swing type of blow?

Is this the United States you were raised on? If ever you heard the word torture back in high school history, I'll bet it was NEVER American soldiers doing the torturing. We learned about the Bataan Death March and the Nazi Death Camps. But I'll bet you thought Americans we're psychologically incapable of torturing others. Nope. We're just as human as everyone else.

It's up to our leaders to set tone and standards. The standards Alberto Gonzales set were wrong. They were un-American. And as he always seems to do, Bush rewards incompetence (Tenent, Rumsfeld, Rice) with the nation's highest honors, or increased duties/job titles. This is the man George Bush has chosen as the nation's top legal mind.

I don't remember where the phrase comes from, but it came to me again just now: a confederacy of dunces.