Khan's Castle

I like John Derbyshire's words about ethnicity, Tibet, and Rev. Wright in this column over at NRO. His final statement gives a nod to simply dealing with reality, something that I'm learning to do more and more.

Check this headline from The New Republic. No pretense of anything except smearing an opposition candidate's image in the effort to win. I keep attempting to find the level-headed decent Liberal op-ed column, and I've enjoyed a number, but these keep popping up. They unfortunately seem more typical than atypical.

I was watching video clips of William F. Buckley debating Noam Chomsky from way back and, while I tend to disagree with Chomsky, I could admire two intelligent people having a civil discussion of ideas and actually debating a point. It stands in marked contrast to what passes for that sort of thing today.

A question that I keep running across in the press is this: Is waterboarding torture?

Are they kidding?

Of course it's torture. Just read the description. Entertaining a debate on that question at all is nothing more than so much mincing of words so that someone can claim that the US doesn't engage in "torture". It's fundamentally dishonest. Better to simply say that yes, in some cases we do, but we do our best to not let it get out of hand. Better perhaps, but sometimes politically unacceptable.

It would be nice if it wasn't that way.

South Carolina in the news again. Honestly, has there ever been a more embarrassing state to be from?

And Mark Steyn has one of the funniest columns I've come across yet about the interminable Democratic nomination saga.