An America prepared to casually toss out the most fundamental principles of international humanitarian diplomacy -- along with basic human decency and the rule of law as side helpings -- is not a country others are going to want to cooperate with. It will constitute a threat to their own interests and values. Nor will it be a country blessed with a lot of accurate intelligence. As Soviet dissident Vladimir Bukovsky has pointed out, an intelligence service shot-through with demands that it torture people "degenerates into a playground for sadists," the service itself "an army of butchers" skilled at terrorizing its victims but hardly capable of unraveling complicated investigations.
It's a grim future brought to us by grim and deranged men -- by people who seem to have developed an unhealthy level of admiration for America's enemies. (They want the country they run to transform itself into a facsimile of its evil adversaries.) It's a future in which it may become increasingly hard for decent citizens of this country to say truthfully that they're proud to be Americans.
Imagine if a certain senator got up on the Senate floor and said, simply:
This. Is. Wrong.
He can explain it any way he wants. He can say it's wrong because it's anithetical to all of the ideals of this country. He can say it's wrong because it'll make the baby Jesus cry. I don't care.
I just want one of these people who keep running around telling us that Democrats need to provide leadership to provide some goddamn leadership.