Against the Grain is Suddenly Born Again!

After years and years of incredible nuance on behalf of Bush Administration torture policies (“Golly, what *is* torture anyway! It’s all so confusing!”), after years of warm and sympathetic hearings for any and all arguments that, however tendentious, explain away the obvious teaching of the Church in a cloud of sophistry, after playing empathetic host all the usual suspect from the Ladies’ Gossip Sewing Circle–shazam!

All of a sudden, Against the Grain has had a born again experience and is So Very Concerned about Obama making use of Bush’s hard-fought “right” to inflict torture and “enhanced interrogation”. Best part of this naked exercise of chutzpah: the simultaneous denunciation of Obama’s “moral posturing” (which, in fact, is what it is) with the ongoing sotto voce suggestion that Bush was a great but flawed man who (sadly) didn’t torture enough. That’s the point on tacking on the irrelevant story of the detainee who was (stupidly) freed from Gitmo. The Rubber Hose Right reader is left to connect that dots that opponents of torture don’t get that these people are animals. Of course, left out of the discussion is the fact that the choice is not between “Set every prisoner free, no matter how dangerous, and tell them butterflies are beautiful and so are they” and “Torture them.”

I look forward to the spectacle of Against the Grain’s sudden development of a troubled conscience about torture now that a Lefty wields the power to do evil that has been so long defended, nuanced, minimized and explained away on that blog. Should be very entertaining. Welcome, however, belatedly, to the temporarily convenient world of Catholic moral teaching, AtG! I wonder how many other bloggers who have laughed off Bush use of torture will suddenly grow a conscience now.