Demagogue

Right-wing commentators have circled the wagons around Bush's attorney general designate, ridiculing and misrepresenting the concerns Gonzales' detractors have regarding his connection with the torture memos. Some general themes have emerged among the conservative punditry. Here's an overview:

It Isn't Really Torture
Is it torture to convince a detainee that he is drowning or to go after him with unmuzzled dogs? Not to our friends at the National Review. Writes Jonah Goldberg,

Being forced to sit in a cramped area until you give up valuable intelligence is rough, but this ain't beanbag. Being draped with an Israeli flag or even being ‘waterboarded’ - where a detainee's face is surrounded with a wet blanket and he's made to feel like he's drowning isn't torture either. Our own cadets at the Air Force Academy have been water-boarded in training. The war against torture should begin at home!

I'm not sure where he got the innocuous "wet blanket" image, but from what I've read, waterboarding involves strapping down a victim and lowering him into water until he feels drowning is imminent. And why, Jonah, do you think that they "water-board" some U.S. special forces? To help them resist torture should they be captured by the enemy.

Gonzales Is the One Being Tortured
While denying that the abuses documented at Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo constitute torture, the Right does see one victim here--Gonzales himself. In her column "The Gonzales Hearing: An Exercise in Torture," Concerned Women for America's (CWA) Jan LaRue suggests that what happened in the Senate Judiciary hearings last week was worse than anything committed at the hands of Lynndie England:

[T]he President ordered that terrorists are to be treated in accord with the Conventions except for the provisions regarding legal rights. Torture, of course, is forbidden. It should also be forbidden in Senate Judiciary Committee hearings—as in Bork, Thomas, Ashcroft, Estrada, Pickering and Gonzales.

This is a classic "I'm rubber, you're glue" defense. Take Gonzales' biggest weakness--his links to torture--and turn it on its head. His accusers are the torturers. That LaRue mentions controversial Bush judicial nominee Thomas Pickering here is particularly appropriate, because CWA used similar tactics to defend him. After Pickering was accused of going easy on someone convicted of a racially motivated hate crime, CWA argued that the judge had been lynched by his critics.

Opposing Gonzales = Coddling Terrorists
This is perhaps the most common distortion of the arguments against Gonzales: rather than giving terrorists the torture necessary to defend our freedom, liberals want to make nice with Osama. According to the National Review's Andrew McCarthy, Gonzales' opponents want to make peace treaties with al Qaeda and have "never met a terrorist they wouldn't coddle." The Wall Street Journal's James Taranto takes this one step further, arguing that those who would defend civil liberties by being "nice" to terrorists actually threaten civil liberties:

Democrats' obsession with treating terrorists nicely bespeaks a dangerous moral vanity. They seem to think it is worth increasing the risk of another 9/11--or worse--in order for America to avoid the taint of being accused by the likes of the Red Cross of acts ‘tantamount to torture,’ whatever that means.

There is a variant on the "terrorist coddling" argument that I call the Hogan's Heroes corollary. Both Kay Daly at the Coalition for a Fair Judiciary and the National Review's Rich Lowry reference the '60s comedy about a World War II prison camp (a truly bizarre concept for a sitcom) when discussing liberals' respect for the Geneva Conventions. Here's Lowry:

Those who believe -- apparently as a theological matter -- that Geneva applies to al-Qaida must believe that its terrorists are entitled to dormitories, sports equipment, pay allowances and pretty much anything you remember from ‘Hogan's Heroes.’

Of course, Gonzales' detractors aren't suggesting that we offer terrorists at Guantanamo throw pillows or espresso machines or even LeBeau's delicious apple strudel. Some argue that our interrogation methods are immoral, others that such hardball tactics are ineffective (even Sec'y Rumsfeld has questioned the accuracy of intelligence gained through torture). Still others point out that, according to the Red Cross, the vast majority of detainees are nothing but common criminals.

It would be nice if these folks would address the real arguments, rather than knocking down straw men all day.

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UPDATE: Demagogue reader Bill points us to a piece by Anne Applebaum in today's Washington Post addressing the myth of torture's effectiveness.