I was fumbling around the Constitution and I happened to find this:
"Excessive bail shall not be required, nor excessive fines imposed, nor cruel and unusual punishments inflicted."
Oh yeah, that's the Eighth Amendment!
Ask anybody who has been waterboarded if they think it is cruel. If all the people who are for waterboarding are willing to be waterboarded themselves for twenty minutes, then I say it is just fine. I don't think it is a stretch of the imagination to say that simulating drowning is unusual either.
This isn't just a "lesser of two evils" issue. This is a constitutional issue that should be discussed in terms of are we willing to redefine what cruel and unusual punishment has historically been held to mean by the Supreme Court. The Constitution pretty plainly states that there shall be no "cruel and unusual punishments" inflicted, and a long history of case law supports that the government will enforce that provision to curb executive authority.
But I guess conservatives have no problem legislating from the bench when they don't like what the Constitution says. Its just so downright annoying when it prevents you from doing what you would like to do!
And if waterboarding isn't cruel and unusual, why shouldn't we be able to use it in police stations on regular people? I mean its not cruel and unusual right? Why shouldn't we use it on everyone who won't confess to their crimes?
We had two bags of grass, seventy-five pellets of mescaline, five sheets of high-powered blotter acid, a salt shaker half full of cocaine, a whole galaxy of multi-colored uppers, downers, screamers, laughers…Also a quart of tequila, a quart of rum, a case of beer, a pint of raw ether and two dozen amyls. The only thing that really worried me was the ether. There is nothing in the world more helpless and irresponsible and depraved than a man in the depths of an ether binge. –Raoul Duke
It is hard to shed anything but crocodile tears over White House speechwriter Patrick Buchanan's tragic analysis of the Nixon debacle. "It's like Sisyphus," he said. "We rolled the rock all the way up the mountain...and it rolled right back down on us...." Neither Sisyphus nor the commander of the Light Brigade nor Pat Buchanan had the time or any real inclination to question what they were doing...a martyr, to the bitter end, to a "flawed" cause and a narrow, atavistic concept of conservative politics that has done more damage to itself and the country in less than six years than its liberal enemies could have done in two or three decades. -Hunter S. Thompson
