“You will take it like a man and you will like it, or so help me I break out the nipple clips.”
Red State busts out the torture HoYay:
We sleep safe in our beds because rough men stand ready in the night to visit violence on those who would do us harm. Those rough men might hesitate knowing their commander-in-chief just might not stand behind them if their actions become known. Their hesitation will lead to American deaths.
I feel gayer having just read that. Not that there is anything wrong with that, you handsome, strong, strapping rough guy, you.
*** Update ***
I think it is time to ask our brave patriots again (Maher clip here):
“Would you have sex with another man to stop a terrorist attack?”
kommrade reproductive vigor
I feel gayer. Shit, I’m getting out of here before I start singing "I feel pretty."
Just Some Fuckhead
If only it was a couple sentences longer. I was almost.. there.
ed
Their hesitation will lead to American deaths.
Thank goodness torture hasn’t led to any American deaths. Or innocent deaths of anyone. ‘Cause that would be unfortunate.
Kathy
Something about reading that post right next to that picture of big, strapping, rough Joe the Plumber almost turned me into a gay man.
Chris Johnson
Ooooh. Rough men in the night. I’m imagining them standing oh so ready :D mreow!
How’s that, Fuckhead? Enough?
Are these people self-parody aware or are they that insane that they don’t see the HoYay gushing all over the place? It’s all getting a bit too revealing.
I mean, for them. Personally, I wish to subscribe to their newsletter :)
The Moar You Know
Beds, rough men, standing behind, rough men ready in the night, violence.
This isn’t so much "gay", more like "ass in the air submissive". Wow. Freud would need a fainting couch after reading that.
John Cole
No. SATSQ.
Ripley
fixt
mbuchel
It is amazing how for all their complaining about Hollywood, the right bases it’s entire world view on fictional characters like Jack Bauer and Col. Jessep in A Few Good Men. What would they do without them?
I can’t wait for the moment when Jon Kyl or some other republican hack gives and impassioned speech defending torture on the senate floor and and tearfully ends with a blubbering "We want them on that wall! We need them on that wall!"
Comrade Stuck
LOl. Reminds of the John Belushi (RIP) original SNL parodies on "Manly Men". I wish he were still with us to give the fools at RS and the wingnuttosphere their proper due
jon
Oh noes! If the Commander-in-Chief might not stand by my implementing torture, I might not torture! Oh heck! Darn it all to heck!
And if my girlfriend doesn’t like my sleeping around with prostitutes, I might not get $10 hummers! And my boss doesn’t want me to drink bottles of beer at the prison where I work, my friends probably won’t like it if I get "White Power" tattooed across my forehead, my mom doesn’t want me to punch her in the face when she says something stupid, those dogs might bite me if I kick their ribcages, and policemen might not appreciate me killing all the jaywalkers at the local university. This oppression is making it hard for me to make the world a better place.
I’m going to start a blog or something as soon as I finish my logo based on something I saw at a Renaissance Faire, the Legion of Doom, and that Cracker Jack dog. Then the world will hear from me!
Unabogie
Why does it make me think of this?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rdnRm7z8xIM
John Cole
I know, right? Seriously, that paragraph approached Liberace in a bathhouse territory.
J Royce
From an earlier comment, added here for relevancy of why "24" is actually on the air:
24 is war porn with a purpose. Might MAKES Right: we are the mighty, see, we torture, see, you like it, see …
TeeVee is being used for the largest propaganda op in history, and the most lucrative. My nation is marching itself into servitude with attitude, looking up at the TeeVee, handing over its birthright while our decline is narrated with continuing coverage.
The biggest asset that despotic forces have is the fact that most people will not believe that propaganda works on THEM. Right before said people argue that sometimes torture is "necessary" and the media is liberal. Uh huh.
Sirkowski
Don’t ask; don’t tell.
Doug H. (Comrade Fausto no more)
Meanwhile, here in the real world, a honest-to-Patton war hero lost the election to a black man with a funny name.
The Grand Panjandrum
After reading this in the WSJ you have to wonder just how cowardly are these people?
Pathetic. Red State AND the Wall Street Journal just need their daddy to protect them from all the meanies out in the cold cruel world. What a bunch of goddamned cowards.
gnomedad
Fixed. Wimps.
Krista
It’s a shame that you can’t somehow harness the energy expended during all of the pecker-thwacking that takes place when these idiots think of the torture of brown people. It would probably go a long way towards ending the dependence on foreign oil.
cleek
it’s not even original homo-authoritarian nonsense.
lazy cowards.
Bas-O-Matic
Now where have I heard that before? Oh yeah…
Jessep: You can’t handle the truth! Son, we live in a world that has walls. And those walls have to be guarded by men with guns. Who’s gonna do it? You? You, Lt. Weinberg? I have a greater responsibility than you can possibly fathom. You weep for Santiago and you curse the Marines. You have that luxury. You have the luxury of not knowing what I know: that Santiago’s death, while tragic, probably saved lives. And my existence, while grotesque and incomprehensible to you, saves lives…You don’t want the truth. Because deep down, in places you don’t talk about at parties, you want me on that wall. You need me on that wall.
MattF
Without ‘Dick’ Chaney, or ‘Dick’ Bush, or ‘Dick’ Rumsfeld to protect us… we’re doomed, like totally.
josephdietrich
Cleek beat me to it. This is boilerplate bulljive, stuff I don’t know how many times I’ve seen and heard on mailing lists and at gun shows/shoots. Usually spouted by those guys at the club who don’t realize that no one else likes them, and followed by much rolling of eyes.
MikeJ
Just how rough and manly are these men if they’re willing to stand by and let people die just because they’ll wind up in jail? Sounds like his torturers are whiny little bitches who can’t do a nickle to save American lives.
Incertus
@mbuchel: Beat me to it. It does make sense in a way, though, since most of their lives are lived in this fantasy where God loves them because they’re righteous while He hates everyone else, and when bad things happen to them, it’s because God is either testing their faith or punishing them because they haven’t been assholish enough to the rest of the world. I mean, if that’s the basis from which you begin your reasoning, then torture makes perfect sense.
The Grand Panjandrum
Not exactly OT but let’s face when the wingnuts start quoting Pravda you know we are all in for some classic mocking of that pathetic League of Ordinary
GentlemenGasbags.BC
These people must spend their waking hours imagining people and circumstances that scare them shitless and then use those daydream imaginings to defend "any means necessary." They are wimps and cowards, but worse, they are frightened of the most phatasmagoric things. They must not be able to walk on a street at night – every shadow will be a threat. These are the true anti-Americans, who would throw our proud history of standing up straight and looking at threats in the eye and meeting those threats with our Constitution and laws intact in favor of standing behind the Man on the White Horse, wringing their hands helplessly. For crying out loud, we stood up to Hitler – who had the best army in the world at the time. We stood up to Japan – who had defeated large armies in China and the colonies of England, Netherlands, etc. We stood up to the Soviet Union at a time when there was a true existential threat with nuclear weapons. Now we are supposed to cower in a corner and wait for the "rough men" to save our asses when a bunch of religious maniacs threaten us? Our forefathers have turned their backs on us as not worthy of the country they gave us.
eric k
All you need to do to understand the conservative mind set is watch "A Few Good Men" and remember that they think Nicholson was the hero.
KG
@ 21: that’s exactly what I was thinking when I read that line. I’m amazed that so many on the right have to rely on movie lines to get their point across. And that they have to use a villain’s line to do so. Right up there with approving of "First, let us kill all the lawyers."
Tsulagi
No shit. Erick has been on a real butch journey recently. Maybe due in part to those premature starbursts he experienced at the thought of getting Sarah to recommend his first gun.
Obvious he’s been dwelling A LOT on rough men standing fully ready with their guns at night. Somebody over at RedState better lock up the wetsuits and dildoes laying around unsupervised as Erick seems to be reaching a fevered pitch.
21cdb
Not to spoil the laugh, but he’s quoting Orwell:
Although I imagine that Orwell was not talking about torture (one presumes the "rough men" and violence refers to organized militaries) or buttfucking.
Incertus
@KG: That’s the thing, though–they don’t see those characters as villainous. They see them as "tough-minded" or "pragmatic" or worst of all, "bold," which was King George the Lesser’s favorite adjective to describe himself.
reality-based
fixt again
JL
How many more Americans have lost or afraid they are going to lose their BED because of the Bush economic policies? Since Bush started spying on Americans early in 2001, how did his policies help prevent terrorist attacks?
Why was Richard Clarke demoted?
The whackos need to enlist and go to boot camp and then drool about their master.
Randy Paul
Who should we believe? Erick Erickson or these guys who actually interrogate people for a living without visiting violence on them.
The keyboard commandos need to try living in the real world.
Dulcie
When I first read this, I thought Erick was quoting Peggy Noonan. I realize now Erick was CHANNELING Peggy.
gnomedad
FTW. This is about standard procedure. The ticking-bomb fantasies are a smokescreen.
Johnny Pez
That’s what the Weblog awards are missing — a category for Most Unintentionally Homoerotic Website. Man, the competition would be fierce!
John Harrold
Isn’t there a lot of overlap between the pro-torture set and the unitary executive set? If this is the case, it shouldn’t be necessary to pardon people who tortured at the pleasure of the president. I mean, these folks thought that if the president ordered it, then it was legal, right? By saying that blanket pardons need to be given out, doesn’t that imply that they never really believed it was legal in the first place?
joe from Lowell
Torture got us confirmation that Iraq had WMDs and ties to bin Laden.
And Americans, and a whole of of other people, died.
John Cole
@21cdb: Sadly, no.
We are not morons here. Well, most of the time.
maxbaer (not the original)
Alfred McCoy has a good history of the CIA’s search for better torture methods in "A Question of Torture." Reputedly, the psychological methods are much worse than the physical. Here’s a clip.
Comrade Mary, Would-Be Minion Of Bad Horse
I always thought that original quote was from Orwell, but I couldn’t remember which essay it was from. After a little digging, it appears that he may have never said that.
# In his 1945 "Notes on Nationalism", Orwell did state that, for the pacifist type of a nationalist, the notion that "Those who ‘abjure’ violence can only do so because others are committing violence on their behalf." is impossible to accept. "Notes on Nationalism"
Notes: allegedly said by George Orwell although there is no evidence that Orwell ever wrote or uttered either of these versions of this idea. They do bear some similarity to comments made in an essay that Orwell wrote on Rudyard Kipling, when quoting from one of his poems. Orwell did write, in his essay on Kipling, that the latter’s "grasp of function, of who protects whom, is very sound. He sees clearly that men can only be highly civilized while other men, inevitably less civilized, are there to guard and feed them." (1942)
Ironically, this MetaFilter post, alerting people to a compendium of Orwell on the web, uses this exact quote as a title without anyone calling it out as apocryphal.
Comrade Mary, Would-Be Minion Of Bad Horse
Of course, this wouldn’t be the first time neo-cons tried to use Orwell for their own purposes. Norman Podhoretz wrote this mess for Harper’s back in 1983, in which he tried the old parlour trick of "If X were alive today, sure he would agree with me on all particulars." Sadly, you need to be a subscriber to get access to the whole thing, or anything else from their huge archives.
slag
@Johnny Pez: Sounds like there’s room for some innovation in the Blog award industry. And there’s a blog full of innovators right here.
Jon H
"Rough ready men in the night", the new reunion single from Frankie Goes To Hollywood.
RELAX!
J.D. Rhoades
After reading the Room 101 scene in 1984, I find it hard to believe that Orwell would have endorsed torture.
Linkmeister
Did those guys grow up (well, grow up may not be quite accurate); did they read Mack Bolan rather than Travis McGee or even Matt Helm?
Ed Marshall
The quote isn’t in notes on nationalism It’s in an essay about Kipling. It’s not Orwell saying it, he’s quoting Rudyard Kippling and trying to be fair to him.
Gus
I recognized the Orwell quote. It’s been around quite a bit since the beginning of the Iraq war. Doesn’t make it sound any less gay.
Two of my favorites in that vein:
MLK would be a Republican.
John Lennon would be a conservative.
Notorious P.A.T.
http://thinkprogress.org/2008/11/30/interrogator-torture-washpo/
Comrade Mary, Would-Be Minion Of Bad Horse
Five Internet bucks to anyone who can find that "rough men" quote in Orwell’s Kipling essay or anything else. The closest match to it in the Kipling essay is this:
Notorious P.A.T.
I take no responsibility for the formatting of that post.
gnomedad
Yes. Winston’s torturers were not trying to extract information, or even a confession. The purpose was to destroy his humanity.
SpotWeld
This makes me think a lot of the regular posters at Red State have "daddy issues"… which further makes me think W. has serious "daddy issues".
Brick Oven Bill
Gus Invokes Lennon.
Lennon is an interesting character to bring up. He was shot by a J. D. Salinger fan. The point of the Catcher in the Rye is that innocence cannot protected, and it inevitably comes to an end in the big, bad world. There are strong parallels between the Catcher in the Rye and the debate on torture.
kommrade reproductive vigor
Who ever re-named Red State’s new army "Stroke Force," was right on the money.
J Royce
Doug H. (Comrade Fausto no more) responds: "Meanwhile, here in the real world, a honest-to-Patton war hero lost the election to a black man with a funny name."
Thanks DougH. You missed my point though. Watch what’s happening, and prepare to be surprised at the next act.
My comment was mostly in past tense: it’s been done already. It wasn’t announced by your preferred info sources so you never realized it was occurring. Now people will be endlessly surprised and dismayed at our slow-motion collapse of what they thought they knew as their country.
Nevermind … isn’t there a game on?
Ed Marshall
This straight out of the collection of essays:
It would be difficult to hit off the one-eyed pacifism of the English in fewer words than the phrase "making mock of uniforms that guard you while you sleep."
demimondian
@gnomedad: I don’t have my copy of Orwell’s essays to hand, but IIRC, he argued that the purpose of torture is always to destroy the victim, not really to extract any useful information.
Josh Hueco
That was an excerpt from a faptastic paen to ‘Rough Men’ puglished in 2005. The best part are the links to photos of real rough men from hotornot.com. These people will never be self-aware enough to realize how ghey the fascist aesthetics of their beloved politics are.
DougJ
We
sleep safe inwet our bedsbecauseeven though we believe rough men stand ready in the night to visit violence on those who would do us harm.DougJ
The song "Rough Boys" led many people to believe that Pete Townsend was gay. (wiki video)
Comrade Stuck
OT
Though fitting for Clown Shoes.
Wingnuts have their evidence in hand that Global Warming is a left wing plot to do bad things to us all.
From the gumshoes that never sleep for busting news.
Of course, these brainiacs haven’t thought thru that another ice age might be a wee bit as bad or worse than a warming one. Never you mind, the point is that lieberals have been foiled and that is what counts.
Frank
Torture is their Viagra.
Comrade Mary, Would-Be Minion Of Bad Horse
Ed, I quoted that from his Kipling essay, excerpted above.
Full cite: "Rudyard Kipling", originally published in Horizon, February 1942. This is included in The Collected Essays, Journalism and Letters of George Orwell, Volume II: My Country Right or Left 1940-1943, pp. 215-229 in my yellowed Penguin paperback, with my quoted para showing up on page 218.
The "rough men" quote, which has also been ascribed to Churchill, has been rattling around for years and has been used by neo-cons and torture apologists, among others, to use Orwell’s cred to back up their vicious little views. Orwell almost certainly didn’t write those words, and where he may have said something similar, it is only fair to cite the source, clarify where he’s commenting or quoting, and give some context.
I swear to God, if someone else comes in here with an uncited or barely cited reference to Orwell saying anything, even how to make a fucking cup of fucking tea, Jesus tapdancing Christ, I’m gonna go full-tilt pissy librarian. Ook!
Brick Oven Bill
Re: Parallels
Don’t read this Doug. I do not know of what form of government you are referring J Royce. If you are referring to a form of government that gives all people all rights, I think the current US model is probably the high water mark in world history. That is great, but it is unsustainable, because of economics and the nature of man.
If you refer to the America of, say, one hundred years ago, I’d suggest reading about the Philippine-American War.
It is a near parallel to our engagements in Iraq and Afghanistan*. That America did not just torture combatants. We went after the whole village.
*And the French engagements in Morocco and the English engagements in Iraq and Napoleon’s experience in Egypt.
Silver Owl
Erik’s male insecurity is definitely the top priority of everything. Everyone lives to make Erik finally feel like a man for once in his miserable life.
In fact our whole intelligence organization and military live to make sure one day Erik finds his manhood. In fact before anyone in my family went military we specifically discussed the insecure manhoods of today’s conservatives and how important it is to lose control, die and get wounded for the whiny bitches. Just so they could sleep like babies. lol
4jkb4ia
I cannot imagine that George Orwell meant that war should not be governed by laws, or that torture could not be helped, when he wrote that. There is a large gulf between things that civilians would not normally do and the humiliating things which we did to people in our custody because we thought they worked.
4jkb4ia
Also there was the detainee who was killed in Iraq without a single shred of intelligence being got out of him, who Jane Mayer wrote about.
4jkb4ia
@Comrade Mary, Would-Be Minion Of Bad Horse:
Maybe he didn’t write it! Excellent!
slip
There are strong parallels between the Catcher in the Rye and the debate on torture.
Sounds like something that phony Ackley would say while his clipped fingernails littered the carpeting.
Left Coast Tom
@39, John Harrold
There used to be. Now that Obama is about to become the executive, they don’t think he should be so unitary.
From the GOS: http://www.dailykos.com/storyonly/2009/1/6/1003/89780
neal peart
Reminds me of the Pete Townsend song "And I Moved".
Just Some Fuckhead
@Silver Owl: lolz
Comrade Glocksman
@Linkmeister:
As a kid back in the late 1970’s I discovered the whole Pinnacle Books line of ‘adventure novels’ (The Destroyer, The Executioner, The Penetrator, The Death Merchant, etc.) at a local used bookstore and came to these conclusions.
1. The Penetrator would have made a great title for a porn novel. Even the title masthead on the cover was phallic shaped.
2. Mack Bolan didn’t like torture and wouldn’t have got along well with Jack Bauer.
3. The Death Merchant series was about a mercenary who did contract work for the CIA. He also didn’t mind torture, was into the occult, and kept two pet pigs on his ranch in Texas.
4. The Destroyer series was the most offbeat and entertaining of them all. Some of you may remember the 1985 movie Remo Williams: The Adventure Begins. It was based on these books.
They aren’t great literary works by any means, but to this day I lenjoy reading the Destroyer books as simple escapist fare.
Dave_No_Longer_Laughing
That’s a great question. The right answer is: "that’s it? Heck, I figured you’d at least want me to make an anti-American statement on international TV or something? Fine, then, let’s do it and the attack will stop… Am I pitching or catching?"
What if the person making the demand doesn’t have the power to stop the attack and just wanted to get off?
What got me about the torture stuff is that those doing the torturing actually thought it would work. Many moons ago (before his mysterious "death"), William Colby spoke at my university. He mentioned that, during WWII, it was discovered that torture did not work. Torture – by the Germans… – strengthened the resolve of the subject, up to the point that he died without revealing any useful information. Also, what information you did get was likely wrong. Records from the Spanish Inquisition generally indicate that the subject of torture will eventually say anything to make it stop. Bottom line: torture doesn’t make sense.
Now, as I recall, the subject came up in the news – or in a news analysis – on 12 Sept 2001. And I recall thinking "what are they talking about? everything I’ve heard, and from reliable sources, is that torture isn’t an option because it doesn’t work. Why is it even being discussed? I figured that there either are some serious pro-torture people who didn’t get the Colby memo or the "media" decided this will be the issue they’ll use to bring down the Bush admin as retaliation for the 2000 election. From what I’ve seen over the last 8 years, I’m convinced it’s 15% of the former and 85% of the latter. It may even be less of the former… I’m also convinced a lot of folks (many of whom post here) want to believe that the US engages in torture that would curl the toes of Torquemada.
I don’t buy it because the folks who did engage in torture at Abu Gharib were turned in right away, prosecuted and sentenced to prison. That’s got to count for something. Likewise, the Lt. Caleys, the John Ronghis, et al. are known only because they were turned in by fellow soldiers who recognized the crimes for what they were. This kind of behavior (that is, turning in your fellow soldier) comes from properly trained soldiers. Whoa! I wrote about this in Balloon Juice almost five years ago!
Wile E. Quixote
@jon
Oh my God this is brilliant. You forgot to add Star Trek to the list above though, that’s what blobby conservatards like Jonah Goldberg really get off on.
Prof B
You know, if you’re going to misquote Orwell, you might as well follow Erick’s lead and misquote something Orwell never said.
The "rough men in the night" thing has been percolating around the right-blogosphere/mil-geek-osphere since 9/11 — US Special Operations Command even did a recruiting poster based on it — but the problem is that no one, least of all George Orwell (to whom it is inevitably credited), appears ever to have said it.
So it seems to be some kind of spontaneous expression of the group male mil-geek homoerotic collective unconsciousness.
Which makes it WAY much better!
Michael
Reminds me of that show "Dinner and a Movie" in which the talking heads would make a meal thematically related to the film they were otherwise interrupting.
My favorite? "You Can’t Handle the Soup!" (Spicy Black Bean soup) and "A Few Good Men".
Rhonda
To hell with this, BSG season 4.5 Friday! Finally!
JWW
Hey John,
Can I comment on a TV show? That would be nice. But watch out, it may expose your spine.