NOW for some torture...

Also via Brad DeLong, a letter in which someone points out that John Yoo, infamous auhor of torture members, actually told Jane Mayer of The New Yorker that the 2004 election was a referendum on the U.S. policy of torture. Letter points out, then, that Yoo actually said the equivalent of "A vote for Bush in 2004 was a vote for torture."

Do people who voted for Bush in 2004 understand that? And which is worse: that they voted for him knowing they were supporting torture, or that they voted for him believing otherwise? Perhaps there's no longer any difference.

"To know and not to know, to be conscious of complete truthfulness while telling carefully constructed lies, to hold simultaneously two opinions which cancelled out, knowing them to be contradictory and believing in both of them, to use logic against logic, to repudiate morality while laying claim to it, to believe that democracy was impossible and that the Party was the guardian of democracy, to forget whatever it was necessary to forget, then to draw it back into memory again at the moment when it was needed, and then promptly to forget it again : and above all, to apply the same process to the process itself."

Ah, the essence of doublethink...