One Boy's Story

Andrew Sullivan writes with panache, with purple pulsating words, his thoughts simultaneously pounding and parsing modern history with grand flourishes, all in the principled service of seeking justice and righting wrongs. Too bad he doesn't care very much what his words mean.

The fact that arguably the leading conservative intellectual in Washington, Charles Krauthammer, has openly supported the power of the president to torture solely on his own discretion and minimally if it could save one single life reveals how much contempt the current right has for individual liberty.

The right has contempt for individual liberty because it supports the President ordering the torture of a few terrorists? (First of all, what Andrew considers torture cannot be taken seriously, not in this world. The Left, as it so often does, waters down words--in this case torture--as to render them useless, thus torture now means putting a caterpillar in with one of these monsters.) Andrew goes out of his way to use contempt here; not only does the right not care about individual liberty, it holds such ideals in contempt. That's how low the current right has fallen! It has contempt for individual liberty!

How Andrew makes the leap from supporting harsh interrogations of a handful of terrorists (a limited number of high-value detainees) to accusing the right of having contempt for individual liberty is to say, among other things, there is no difference between the mastermind of 9/11 and any private citizen. I would beg to differ.