True dumb asses at work

I find this video clip from last Sunday’s “This Week With George Stephanopoulos” astonishing. Here we have a group of Washington pundits seated about a table, agreeing that the Bush administration monsters who devised torture routines enhanced interrogations should not be prosecuted.

Particularly reprehensible is Peggy Noonan, who worries that “Somethings in life need to be mysterious.” We should simply look the other way and “keep walking.” Indeed, the recently released memos that read like instructions to the torturers of the Spanish Inquisition should not have seen the light of day. What possible good could come of admitting error, much less literal prosecution of people who only meant well by subjecting detainees deprived habeas corpus to simulated drowning nearly 200 times within a month?

What this video exemplifies is Hannah Arendt’s famous description of “the banality of evil” by which the most heinous, inhumane acts are normalized. That these people are supposed to be “watchdogs” of the Fourth Estate is more evidence of the complete corruption of media. They are literal complicitors in the normalization of torture and the Orwellian use of language to render it something less than the horror it is.

The “banality” extends of course to the depth of their own intellects. There’s no need for these “journalists” to consider Constitutional law or the Geneva Accords and other international treaties. Moral and ethical inquiry are completely beside the point.

They sound like high school sophomores trying to excuse a practical joke that went bad.