QUOTES OF THE DAY: on Torture and Bush

EDITORIAL OF THE DAY: "Even though military officers like Capt. Fishback and
retired senior generals Colin Powell and John Shalikashvili endorsed the
McCain measure, the Bush administration fought it, insisting that it would
tie U.S. hands in waging the war on terror. Yet when Americans feel free to
treat other human beings, even evil ones, with the kind of cruelty that the
whole world saw at Abu Ghraib, their hands deserve to be tied.
We congratulate the Senate majority, including Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison,
for standing up to the president and siding with the Ian Fishbacks and Colin
Powells, not the Alberto Gonzaleses and Donald Rumsfelds. The House of
Representatives should lift itself up in protest by its moral backbone, too,
and Mr. Bush should stand down from his threatened veto. There is no honor
in it.' - Dallas Morning News, today. (Reg req.) Good for them.


QUOTE FOR THE DAY: "This newspaper is second to none in its pro-American
sentiments; in the early Bush years it devoted much ink to defending the
President against the often malevolent and ignorant attacks of a
congenitally anti-American European media. But we know a lost cause when we
see one: the longer President Bush occupies the White House the more it
becomes clear that his big-government domestic policies, his preference for
Republican and business cronies over talented administrators, his lack of a
clear intellectual compass and his superficial and often wrong-headed grasp
of international affairs – all have done more to destroy the legacy of
Ronald Reagan, a President who halted then reversed America’s post-Vietnam
decline, than any left-liberal Democrat or European America-hater could ever
have dreamt of. As one astute American conservative commentator has already
observed, President Bush has morphed in the Manchurian Candidate, behaving
as if placed among Americans by their enemies to do them damage." -
editorial in the conservative British newspaper, The Business.