it's more like a spa visit.

The very same crowd that insists on obeying an "absolute morality" routinely engages in some pretty breathtaking semantic masturbation when it comes to the subject of torture.

Take waterboarding, for example. The logic of the Bush administration and its cheerleaders seems to be as follows:

a.) The CIA uses waterboarding to extract information from enemy combatants.

b.) We don't torture, because we're the good guys (see "absolute morality" above). Therefore, waterboarding is not torture.

Now, I don't know about you, but if you strapped me to a board, tilted me head-down, wrapped my face in cloth or cellophane, and then ran water down my head until my body was convinced that I'm drowning, I'd call that "torture". I bet that the same technique, if used by the jihadists on American captives, would readily be labeled "torture" by most anyone who claims that it isn't torture when the sameself jihadists are the ones strapped to the board. (Yeah, they do far worse to our guys, but that's not the point here.)

I don't have patience for semantic games, and it's a bit insulting for the Bushbots to just stretch the definition of the term "torture". If you use that technique for interrogation, then come flat out and say, "if we catch your jihadist ass trying to cause harm to Americans, you better believe we'll torture you to get you to sing." But don't piss on our collective legs and tell us it's raining, when everyone with half a brain can see that the stream is yellow.

In light of the ongoing efforts of the administration to insist that the sky isn't blue if a blue sky violates the Constitution, I do get a good chuckle out of Conservatives when they accuse Liberals of "twisting language" and practicing "relative morality".

Now, whether torture is proper and necessary under such circumstances is a debate for another time. However, regardless of your position on the use of it to prevent terrorists from harming us and ours, it doesn't do us any good to engage in semantic games.

From the article about the testimony of the new candidate for AG, I'm not getting my hopes up about this guy being any better than Spineless Alberto. I mean, the whole thing reads like a conversation with the Girlfriend With No Opinion Of Her Own.

"I don't know, do you think it is? 'Cause if you do, I totally think it is, too."