Heartless Fred Barnes, Conservative

Anyone watching CNBC Monday might have caught Fred Barnes, conservative pundit and executive editor of The Weekly Standard, defending the Bush Administration. When asked if the “interrogation technique” known as water-boarding were torture, Barnes quickly sneered and stated that water-boarding wasn’t torture.

Which demonstrates that Fred Barnes is a callous, heartless man. Saying that water-boarding isn’t torture is like saying that beer isn’t alcohol. If our soldiers were water-boarded by the Iraqi insurgency--that is, repeatedly dunked upside down in a tub of cold water to the brink of unconsciousness and death by drowning--we would be apoplectic with rage. And savage, insensitive pundits like Barnes would no doubt be calling for the nuclear destruction of Iraq and the rest of the Middle East.

But beyond the moral bankruptcy of Fred Barnes, his comments are typical of pretending-to-be-compassionate conservatives. In the past five years, their notion of compassion has come to include hatred, anger, rage and retribution. And now, torture. No wonder their intellectual house is on fire.

The conservative revolution is becoming the conservative disaster, and with each passing interview, press conference, mismanaged agency, budget crisis and influence scandal, the true nature of their cause is being exposed. Beneath lies a fanatically mean-spirited, divisive, vengeful, greedy and immoral core. And all the pretzel logic, Orwellian double speak and redefinitions will fail, in the end, to hide this fact.

Sorry, Fred. Water-boarding is torture. And the politicians you voted for crafted a policy approving torture. So please, either grow a brain and grasp that fact, or grow a backbone and tell us who you really are.