The Republican Party: Defenders of Torture

Because the Republicans are now explicitly defending torture under Bush and Cheney (while using the euphemism, "enhanced interrogation techniques"), since it allegedly succeeded in getting information useful in stopping terrorist attacks (which of course cannot be disclosed), they are implicitly asserting that the ends justify the means. But if the same people who choose the means also define the ultimate ends (i.e. win a nebulous and perpetual "war on terror"), then how does even that justification become an enforceable standard? It's just another way of saying that if they have power, the Republicans will do anything to achieve what they have decided is in the national interest. This is a road to the same authoritarianism that they accuse, rightly or wrongly, Iran and Venezuela of practicing. So, they abandon morality in public life even as they demand that we practice their version of it in our private lives (e.g. stop being gay, practice abstinence), and they commit the rankest hypocrisy by asking for state power to torture you if you're suspected of being a terrorist, even as, ridiculously, they accuse President Obama --- who refuses to torture -- of being a dictator. This is a political party in an advanced stage of serious alienation from any rational standards of consistency, logic or public ethics. It has also abandoned respect for the rule of law and rendered itself unfit for national power so long as its present leaders and thinkers would set the agenda.