Left largely unremarked during this week’s episode of Dancing with the Torturers is a curious dispute over whether soul-mortgager John McCain agreed that techniques good enough for the Viet Cong are good enough for us. A 2007 memo from the Justice department’s Office of Legal Counsel reports the CIA saying he signed off on enhanced ghoulishness:

“[S]everal Members of Congress, including the full memberships of the House and Senate Intelligence Committees and Senator McCain, were briefed by General Michael Hayden, Director of the CIA, on the six techniques that we discuss herein. In those classified and private conversations, none of the Members expressed the view that the CIA detention and interrogation program should be stopped, or that the techniques at issue were inappropriate.”

But a McCain spokesbot said Monday that — are you sitting down? — the CIA got it wrong:

“Senator McCain clearly made the case that he was opposed to unduly coercive techniques, especially when used in combination or taken too far — including sleep deprivation.”

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Say, did you hear that President Obama is going to speak directly to classrooms via the Internet on September 8? What a wonderful idea!

• Free Republic: “He’s recruiting his civilian army. His ‘Hitler’ youth brigade.”
• All American Blogger: “Hitler knew that if you control the youth, you control the future. I wrote about him in ‘The Threats to Homeschooling: From Hitler to the NEA.'”
• AmericanElephant: “Totalitarian regimes around the world have sought to spread their propaganda and entrench their power by brainwashing the children. I guess it’s easier to indoctrinate a six-year-old instead of fighting a 26-year-old or being challenged by a 46-year-old in the voting booth”

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So, who’s calling for a presidential assassination today?

After an audience member shouted a question about “Obama tags” during a discussion on wolves, [Idaho Republican gubernatorial candidate Rex] Rammell responded, “The Obama tags? We’d buy some of those.”

Rammell, a veterinarian and former elk rancher from Idaho Falls, said his comment was a joke and he would never seriously talk about President Obama that way, although he doesn’t support anything Obama’s done as president.

“I was just being sarcastic. That was just a joke,” Rammell said. “I would never support him being assassinated.”

On the one hand, we’ve been making JFK jokes pretty much all our life. On the other hand, our usual audience doesn’t include idiots toting assault rifles.

Rammell howls at Otter for not buying wolf tag [Twin Falls (Idaho) Times-News, via Political Wire]

Maria Bartiromo:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dn6gV4p9vdY

Our elite media.

BONUS Wankery – The USS Constitution:

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Richard Cohen just can’t figure this torture thing out. He’s worred about Ishmael, a terrorist he dreamed up:

Now he is in American custody. What will happen? How do we get him to reveal his group’s plans and the names of his colleagues? It will be hard. It will, in fact, be harder than it used to be. He can no longer be waterboarded. He knows this. He cannot be deprived of more than a set amount of sleep. He cannot be beaten or thrown up against even a soft wall. He cannot be threatened with shooting or even frightened by the prospect of an electric drill. Nothing really can be threatened against his relatives — that they will be killed or sexually abused.

Don’t you hate it when you can’t threaten to fuck a detainee’s grandmother?

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We’ve never really appreciated high-school movies — they never reflect our own experience. We may have been a card-carrying geek in our teen years, but we had a great time.

We credit the genius of a mid-century architect, who designed our school as a long building with the gym at one end and the auditorium at the other, effectively separating the freaks from the jocks.

We also credit well-funded public schools in the Seventies, when art, music and drama weren’t yet considered frills.

And we credit a wonderfully casual attitude among parents, who really didn’t care that we proudly displayed a vibrator in the bandroom trophy case, or that we performed a musical called “Lock Up Your Daughters.”

Those days are long past, of course. But every so often, something brings them to mind:

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