The Oregonian is chock full of poor columnists/editorialists. David Sarasohn's columns are generally unreadable. Steve Duin writes nice pieces about his family but otherwise prefers choosing very easy targets for his screeds, and he can't be counted upon to marshal anything beyond a few ad hominems mixed in with a few bromides in support of his position.
But the worst of a bad lot is certainly David Reinhard. His columns are so bad, so illogical, so grossly banal that I at times wonder if he is really a closet leftist who's been planted on the Oregonian staff to help discredit the right. Not that they need much help these days, or that they hold much sway in anywhere but the countryside in Oregon, but his continued presence begs some explanation (trying to keep rural circulation up?).
His latest bomb is a piece about waterboarding where he tries to present us with a situation where obviously no one sane could think it was not right to waterboard. The only problem that David neglects to mention is that interrogation techniques of this type (i.e. torture) are not reliable in eliciting good intelligence. (Of course they are also illegal, immoral, etc., but we'll stick with an argument someone of David's ilk can actually understand).
So given David his scenario, the terrorist is waterboarded, tells us that the target was NYC (certainly a target the CIA or FBI would believe), but oh shit it turns out the target was actually Boston. So even though we failed, acted immorally, and illegally, and helped to further ruin the reputation of the United States abroad, hey - at least we gave it the old college try, right Dave?
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
No comments:
Post a Comment