By not insulting their intelligence. Newt Gingrich, after saying that the party needs candidates "who can offer sound intellectual reasons for their philosophy," breaks out into the old song and dance and continues to cover for Bush et al. In response to a question about Bush's authorization of torture:
As a British court noted, waterboarding is not torture. Waterboarding has been routinely used to train American pilots in the military to understand what interrogation techniques they might encounter. The reference to the Khmer Rouge is the kind of moral equivalence President Reagan warned against in his "Evil Empire" speech in 1983. The Khmer Rouge killed millions of people, annihilated the Cambodian intellectuals, and was among the worst inhumane movements in the last century. The United States has used specific enhanced interrogation techniques in specific circumstances against very high-level terrorists for the purpose of saving innocent civilian lives, not for taking them.
Translation: if they do it, it's torture; if we do it, it's an EIT. I think that's called American exceptionalism: we can do whatever evil we like, because we're America, and being America makes it all good. It's the kind of parochial, ahistorical, self-loving, intellectually unserious cant we've been getting from the right for such a long time.
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