Naturally, we’re all annoyed to see good diaries get pushed down and ignored. It’s also annoying just to sort through more chaff to get to the wheat. And if it’s harder to find the good diaries, it’s harder for RedState to promote the best ideas of its readers.

So how about the Editors’ approving a user’s first diary before allowing it to be posted on the site?

I know this constitutes extra effort for the Editors, and, for all I know (Neil?), it’s too difficult to change the way the website works in order to make this happen.

But it sure would be nice.

Thanks for the consideration.

Especially since your man for the CIA has been taking a pounding over which interrogation methods he would support, I thought you would find a definition of torture helpful.

In a word, if journalists volunteer for it, it’s not torture.

A veritable parade of journalists volunteered to be waterboarded just for the experience and to get a good story. They knew, a priori, that it is not the same as being tortured. Would they voluntarily have had electric shocks applied to their genitals, or voluntarily submitted to violent shaking, or burning? Of course not. Those things are torture, and no one volunteers to be tortured, however it is done.  Waterboarding is not torture.

And these are journalists, Pres. Obama – the least respected, least courageous men and women in all of America.  Their favorite words in the English language are “free all-you-can-eat buffet.”  Even you, whom they worship as the Aztecs worshipped Quetzalcoatl, could not bear their company for more than, “like, 8 questions.”  Yet the first journalists to go in for the experience of waterboarding not only survived it, recovering so quickly that they were able to write stories about it for their 5 o’clock deadlines, but sent their colleagues in to try it for themselves. 

So eat your waffle in ease, Pres. Obama, and ignore the pestering of the press.  If they can take waterboarding, our enemies can, too.  (In fact, if reporters can take it, perhaps we should go a bit further with our enemies, eh?)

To emphasize the point in another way, would the Special Forces deliberately debilitate the personnel they are training by applying electric shocks to their genitals, for example, just so they could learn to resist the procedure? Of course not. They wouldn’t torture their own personnel, nor would their personnel go along with it.  

Or would you say that we are torturing our own soldiers in ways that we refuse to torture the enemy?  Are our boot camps worse than Guantanamo?  If you think so, please tell us. 

In the bad old days (still ongoing outside the U.S.), people used to get tortured absolutely gruesomely, and they weren’t worth a darn afterwards–between the maiming and the nightmares.  And that kind of torture tended not to produce the best information; people would make stuff up, just to get the pain to stop.  Now comes an amazing method that leaves no scarring, physical or mental–it should be hailed as the polio vaccine of torture–the game-changing break-through. 

Ah, but no.  Because even if it doesn’t scar, or traumatize psychologically–*if it works* it must be verrrrry unpleasant, probably awful, so better not do it.  The media and the academics and the lawyers are almost saying that any kind of interrogation that produces good intelligence must be so unpleasant that we ought not to do it.  That’s like saying, “OK, Doc, you can operate on my tumor, but at the first sign of blood–you must stop.  I’m against bleeding–it’s violent.”  You can interrogate them, but it’d better not be very successful.  All of this, even just interrogation with no pressure is an expression of hard power, which they abhor.  It could be tickling the soles of their feet with a feather, and they’d oppose it if it worked.  The mentally ill leftists in this country have managed to turn everything into its opposite.  They all need a dose of reality, and I’m afraid they just might get it.  (Well, they might not, but the rest of us will.)

Waterboarding is, in fact, a God-send for those involved in gathering intelligence. It is highly effective–and because it doesn’t scar the subject either physically or mentally and it doesn’t damage the humanity of either the subject or the one applying it.

Waterboarding is torture we can all believe in.

Yours most truly,

“icbm”

VanishingNYRep gets some of the answer, I think: long Jewish resistance to the Right in Europe (kings, kaisers, and tsars). It is probably true that anti-Judaism came more from the Right than from the Left in Europe until the 20th century, and the idea of an anti-Jewish Right persists, even though the Left is now far more hostile to Jews. But threats to Jews sometimes came from the common people while the nobility and higher placed clergy offered protection. Such was the case in certain countries during the Crusades, for instance, and in Poland at certain times. The political interests of Jews depended partly on the country and partly on the class of the Jews in question, and, as always, partly on which political winds were blowing at that time. And other Jews were simply not politically involved.

There are theological reasons, too, as VanishingNYRep points out, for being Democrat, but there are just as many, if not more, for being Republican.

There are also recent political reasons for Jewish Americans to vote Democratic, such as, to take only a couple examples, Truman’s recognition of Israel and a perceived (and sometimes real) anti-Jewish bias among certain Republicans (e.g., Sec. James Baker III).

But the main reason, I think, that so many Jews are liberals goes back about 200 years to the French Revolution. Before that time, there were only orthodox Jews (and they weren’t called orthodox – just Jews). There were different groups with varying customs and ideas, but they were all in practice orthodox. With the French Revolution came “liberation” – the Jews were to be treated as everyone else. It wasn’t only to do them justice, after a fashion, but also to remove their Jewishness and make them citizens like all others.

It was legally a liberation, but it was also terribly destructive. A great number of Jews wanted nothing more than the acceptance of the European societies that had spurned them, and in order to gain that acceptance, they tossed away as much of the Jewish tradition as possible in order to live like their neighbors. Reform Judaism was born with the goal of creating a kind of Christian Judaism. In Germany, there were even Reform synagogues that held services on Sundays, and it is still common to find organs in Reform synagogues. In some Reform synagogues, they do not wear skullcaps, and much of the service is not in Hebrew but in the native tongue of the place. And many Jews simply abandoned the synagogue and the tradition entirely.

In this way, many Jews became children of the French Revolution and followed its ideals. Liberte, Egalite, Fraternite means more now to most Jews than the Torah and Talmud (if indeed they know them at all). If they quote Torah, they especially like lines like, “Justice, justice shall ye pursue…” and then immediately interpret this to mean the contemporary brand of social justice (rather than the more obvious answer: following the Law given to Moses).

Such is my idea on the subject. I’ve read only a few books and articles. There are other views, though, from more educated persons. For instance, some say that because Jews have been oppressed so long, their sympathies are naturally with others who are oppressed, leading them to lean to the political Left. But any full explanation, I believe, has to go back centuries and consider the course of European history.

Suggestions for Further Reading

Semites and Anti-Semites

by Bernard Lewis

Napoleon and the Jews (Wikipedia article)

A History of Jews in the Modern World

by Howard M. Sachar
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