Hindsight is written by the victors?
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I was kinda shocked to read your post. Is it too much to ask that the people running this nations spy agency not be a criminal? Is being a “known quantity” enough these days?
I dunno… It seems to me that we would want a person who can recognize an illegal order. I’d also tend to favor someone who doesn’t cover up their own criminal activity.
It is far worse than what? Having Haspel? Hasn’t she shown herself to be a fool for destroying evidence during an investigation? Hasn’t she shown herself incompetent by following what are clearly illegal orders and torturing people? Hasn’t she shown herself to be corrupt by locking up people without a trial or even a deposition contrary to our laws?
I’ll take petty and vengeful over blind willingness to commit crimes any day.
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see you later too, but
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macabre machinations are not violations of the Geneva Convention.
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Do you even recognize the gaslight when you flicker it? What’s that, it was good for the goose but the gander needs to diet? It’s sensible for one political party in congress to exercise their responsibility to try to find out if a nominee is competent by trying to find something wrong with them, but the other party should be a party of handwavers, posing no opposition in the traditional ways opposition is shown in that house??
While not great, Haspel is a known quantity and we could do a ton worse.
Yes she is, and yes, we could nominate Dick Cheney, so technically you’re not incorrect, but my are you wrong here. I look forward to reminding you of this quote of yours here in… lets say 6-8 weeks.
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I’ll put it on my calendar and we can regroup then.
I’ll go light on the BS for a few days before, just to leave room for it.
There’s no guarantee one or both wouldn’t flip and Pence being a tie breaker. Of course Dems made it even worse but I have little confidence that she wouldn’t have been confirmed even without any D support.
Just yet another terrible person in Trump’s cabinet at this point.
If someone were actually committed to those ideas instead of just being an asshole I’d probably think they were an improvement, but I think most of them (e.g. Rand Paul) are just assholes.
Thomas Massie is one of them, and he figured it out:
“All this time, I thought they were voting for libertarian Republicans. But after some soul searching I realized when they voted for Rand and Ron and me in these primaries, they weren’t voting for libertarian ideas — they were voting for the craziest son of a bitch in the race. And Donald Trump won best in class, as we had up until he came along.”
I know you’ve already got lots of pushback on this, so I’ll try not to be boring. You might be right that she is the best that can be done.
Waterboarding isn’t some little thing we can overlook. Waterboarding victims often had to be resuscitated because they stopped trying to avoid drowning and simply inhaled water. Imagine how broken a person would have to be that their despair would override their instinct to avoid inhaling water. They didn’t just consciously want to die, their lifesaving reflexes were turned off.
Torture isn’t bad, it’s horrific. An organization that tortures promotes people who can stomach torture, which means it promotes people who have no empathy, no regard for other people’s experiences or other people’s lives. A person who came to run such an organization is almost certainly a person is excited by watching other people suffer and die.
This is a proof by contradiction that the rationality of accepting something bad to prevent something worse just doesn’t work. If this is the conclusion then something is wrong with the premise.
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If McCain wasn’t sick I can almost guarantee you that he would have caved on Haspel. This has been “the Maverick’s” M.O. since at least the Cheney Regency. But that’s not the main issue here…
Which only removes another reason why any Dem should vote to confirm a torturer at all. There’s no shame in the Dems saying “we can’t win this one on the numbers, but we’re not going to sacrifice standards of basic human decency and liberal-democratic values for the sake of ‘comity’ with a party that doesn’t adhere to those same standards and values.”
She isn’t. The backup nominee, Susan Gordon, is comparable in terms of intel experience and not being a Dolt-45 loyalist and differs mainly in that she didn’t participate in torture.
Exactly. I’d add for those who don’t care about the morality or ethics that it also really isn’t effective in real life situations. The intel product of the torture is just as likely to be bad as it is good, because a torture victim will often tell the interrogator what he thinks she wants to hear rather than the (known or unknown) truth.
Of course, the sort of person who doesn’t care about morality or ethics rarely cares about effectiveness either – see America’s Know-Nothing 25% who think “24” is a docu-drama.
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I’ll admit that does make Haspel’s nomination even more insane and indefensible. Though I do think that people who have risen through the CIA are probably universally monstrous. Still, it would be nice to have someone who never felt good about inducing a heart attack in a helpless prisoner.
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Very kind of you.
Dear Torture-enabling Democrats:
The bad news is that you’ve revealed yourselves as vile, despicable psychopaths who should never even have been allowed to get a driver’s license, let alone reach public office.
The good news is that we can now work to get you the permanent vacations you so richly deserve.
Mark Warner is one of my Senators. He’s been pissing me off for a long time by acting like a Republican. I hope someone primaries him and leaves him in the dust!
I believe you’re experiencing the Bargaining phase of the 6 stages of grief.
“Stop the world I want to get off.” is an actual Lucy Van Pelt quote. Lucy was a feminist hero of mine growing up. So get stuffed. 
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Essential reading here is from The Intercept:
…as Glenn Greenwald called this one days ago. His article points out how the Democratic Party ALWAYS enables the, Surveillance and Security services in any illegality. They preserve the fiction that the “party” does not support torture and warrantless wiretapping and so on by having a rotating cast of ‘maverick breakway’ Congressmen vote for different violations of civil rights, so that few of them (except maybe Heyer and Feinstein) acquire reputations as CIA/NSA servants.
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Probably the Election. Manchin is in for a tough fight, I don’t know about the others. I dislike Haspel as much as the next person, but sometimes you have to do what you have to do. Politics, you know.
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Which is like saying we need gumdrop trees and chocolate caramel rivers. Sure, we need it. Are we going to get it? No. No? So, let’s move on.
We just need more democrats. Of course, we cannot rely on Joe Manchin of West Virginia. We need more democrats registered and more democrats elected from purple/less red states. Of course, this whole issue would not exist if we had had a Democrat POTUS.
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