Joke Murder on the Orient Express

[Poop Fresh-Herbed Pickles]

I feel I am expected to be soft on Obama cause of his skin tone

Why would you feel that?

[Poop Fresh-Herbed Pickles]

Here's a clip from Big Man Japan...

http://www.comicbookresources.com/?page=article&id=21189

[bebopbalogna]

pretty cool optical illusion.     stare at the black dot in center.  keep eyes on dot even after countdown is complete. 

[Doctor Rock]

Gee, the sky appears blue for a fraction of a sec! 

[Bizarro]

New Wilco up at HIWPYS. Haven't heard it yet.

[Bizarro]

Just caught The Decemberists on Leno. When did they start adding all of the prog touches? I may need to get a copy of their new record after all.

[matthew]

The U.S. has faced many foes far more dangerous than al Qaeda, which, incredible success of the September 11, 2001 attacks aside, represents but a crumb of the widely discredited radical Islamist movement (rejected by almost all nations that have suffered its attempts at violent intimidation) that has achieved very little in the four decades since its inception - can we assume that torture has long been a policy of the United States of America?

If a largely unsuccessful (yet overhyped and exploited by those who claim to defend us) warrants torture, then surely German, Japanese and Soviet imperialists - who could have conceivably posed an existential threat to the American Empire - must surely have been regularly subjected to the most savage torture. Correct? I mean, if it were true that circumstances warrant it?

Unlike bin Laden who, for his 1997 interview on CNN, paid several unrelated guerrillas training in the Afghan camps to pose as members of his own army, the Germans and Japanese had battleships, submarines, aeroplanes and troops numbering in the millions. The Soviets had all of this and many nuclear devices.

al-Qaeda, the apparent scourge of the known universe, despite its capacity for brazen assaults which yield great devastation, remain of limited resources (twice as many people were killed by two teenage boys armed with semiautomatic weapons walking the halls of their Colorado high school as were killed in al-Qaeda's 1993 attack on the WTC). So if this threat warrants "taking off the gloves", is it fair to assume that the gloves were never on?

[Doctor Rock]

Come on, you know that the gloves were never on.   I find it bitterly funny that so many US commentators talk as if torture had become US policy only after 9/11.  Latin Americans must find that quite curious. 

[Tripp]

the power of nightmares....

[matthew]

Come on, you know that the gloves were never on. 

It was sarcasm, dude. I was being snarky. I have written quite a bit about how the gloves were never on. However, my point about WWII, etc. stands.

Torture was used by the Cheney Administration in an attempt to extract information to pad their excuses for the planned invasion of Iraq. It was not, as the press often claims, used "despite" its inefficacy, but because of it. They actively sought bad intelligence.

The media portrays the use of torture in a way that actually supports Cheney and Rice's self-serving version of events: that enhanced interrogation techniques were used only because they felt so much pressure to "protect Americans from another attack". In this light Americans are expected to overlook any moral objections to torture and accept the decisions of the administration as noble of heart.