We begin with
Damon Linker's excellent piece over at The Week taking apart Dick Cheney's defense of torture:
Perhaps most stunning of all was Cheney's response to Chuck Todd's question about 26 people who, according to the Senate report, were "wrongfully detained" by the CIA at its overseas black sites. The imprisonment and torture of innocent people? "I have no problem as long as we achieve our objective." The end justifies any means. Got it.
Cheney's hardly the first person to defend such a position. Machiavelli advocated a version of it in The Prince. It's been favored by some of the most ruthless nationalists and totalitarians in modern history. And it's expressed in Book 1 of Plato's Republic by the character Polemarchus (the name means "leader in battle"), who defines justice as helping friends (fellow citizens) and harming enemies (anyone who poses a threat to the political community). This is what patriotism looks like when it's cut off from any notion of a higher morality that could limit or rein it in. All that counts is whether an action benefits the political community. Other considerations, moral and otherwise, are irrelevant.
The problem with this view, which Socrates soon gets Polemarchus to see, is that amoral patriotism is indistinguishable from collective selfishness. It turns the political community into a gang of robbers, a crime syndicate like the mafia, that seeks to advance its own interests while screwing over everyone else. If such behavior is wrong for an individual criminal, then it must also be wrong for a collective.
Paul Waldman at The Washington Post further deconstructs Cheney's torture defense:
Cheney’s argument here – and this was hardly the first time – is that as long as al-Qaeda’s tactics are worse than ours, nothing we do is morally unjustified. [...] even after this repeated questioning, we still don’t know how Dick Cheney or any other torture advocate defines it. Why not? It seems pretty clear. There is simply no definition that anyone could devise that wouldn’t apply to things like stress positions or waterboarding. Try to imagine one. Torture is the infliction of severe physical or mental suffering to obtain information or a confession — but only if it leaves a mark? Or only if it’s done by non-Americans? Any such definition would be absurd on its face.
So when people like Cheney are asked what the definition of torture is, they say, “September 11!” When asked what definition of torture wouldn’t apply to the particular techniques the CIA employed, they just repeat, “We didn’t torture” over and over. They not only defend torture as a means of obtaining intelligence, they sing its praises and insist that it was spectacularly successful, all without having the courage to call the thing by its true and only name.
Much more on this and the day's other top stories below the fold.
Conor Friedersdorf:
Once 9/11 happened, Dick Cheney ceased to believe that the CIA should be subject to the U.S. Constitution, statutes passed by Congress, international treaties, or moral prohibitions against torture. Those standards would be cast aside. In their place, moral relativism would reign. Any action undertaken by the United States would be subject to this test: Is it morally equivalent to what al-Qaeda did on 9/11? Is it as bad as murdering roughly 3,000 innocent people? If not, then no one should criticize it, let alone investigate, charge and prosecute the CIA. Did a prisoner freeze to death? Were others anally raped? Well, what if they were?
If it cannot be compared with 9/11, if it is not morally equivalent, then it should not be verboten.
That is the moral standard Cheney is unabashedly invoking on national television. He doesn't want the United States to honor norms against torture. He doesn't want us to abide by the Ten Commandments, or to live up to the values in the Declaration of Independence, or to be restrained by the text of the Constitution. Instead, Cheney would have us take al-Qaeda as our moral and legal measuring stick.
Switching topics, Elizabeth Warren is still making headlines for her rhetoric on the Senate floor.
John Cassidy at The New Yorker gives his take:
Right now, the Democratic Party has three leaders: President Obama, who is term-limited; Clinton, the establishment successor-in-waiting; and Warren, whose role is difficult to define, but also increasingly difficult to ignore. Of the three, there’s no doubt who is conveying the most consistent message and generating the most enthusiasm among liberal activists: it’s Warren, with her populist crusade against Wall Street and moneyed interests. [...]
The speech she delivered on the floor of the Senate on Friday evening has been viewed more than a quarter of a million times on YouTube. Also on Friday, more than three hundred people who worked on the Obama campaigns in 2008 and 2012 signed a public letter urging Warren to enter the Presidential race. [...] In saying that she’s not running, Warren can continue to use her prominent position in the Senate to promote the causes she believes in. She can also wait to see if Clinton falters. If that doesn’t happen, Warren can eventually fall in line with the party establishment and help elect the first female President. But if Clinton does stumble badly, in Iowa or before, Warren would still have an opportunity to step in. With her name recognition and army of supporters nationwide, many of them young and tech-savvy, she could quickly raise money and put together an improvised campaign operation.
Chris Cillizza:
...Let's say Warren absolutely does not want to run for president and won't be persuaded no matter what happens in the world over the next three to six months. Okay, fine. It still does her NO good to definitively rule out running right now because the second she does that, the huge national media spotlight will begin roving elsewhere -- limiting Warren's influence. At the moment, there is no story bigger in politics than what Warren will do. She can use that attention to push her pet issues -- restricting corporate America and addressing income inequality. She did just that last week with her loudly-declared opposition to the omnibus bill because of its loosening of some derivative trading rules on corporations. Warren's power is at its height nationally at the moment. It makes zero sense for her to pop that balloon herself.
[...] I don't doubt Warren isn't super-interested in the presidential race right now. But, circumstances change. And, over the next few months -- if the drumbeat for her candidacy by the party's left keeps up or even grows louder -- who knows what might happen?
And from the right,
David Brooks also sees potential:
[T]oday, even for those of us who disagree with Warren fundamentally, it seems clear that she does have a significant and growing chance of being nominated.
Her chances are rising because of that word “fight.” The emotional register of the Democratic Party is growing more combative. There’s an underlying and sometimes vituperative sense of frustration toward President Obama [...]
The fundamental truth is that every structural and historical advantage favors Clinton, but every day more Democrats embrace the emotion and view defined by Warren.
Meanwhile, Vivek Murthy has finally been confirmed as surgeon general.
Heather Timmons at Quartz has some background:
Murthy co-founded Doctors for America, a group of 16,000 physicians and medical students that sent a strongly-worded letter (pdf) last year to the Congress, urging politicians to take stricter measures to stop gun violence. That earned him the ire of the National Rifle Association, slowing his confirmation, but may have also been one of the factors that ultimately helped him win the support of dozens of politicians, medical groups, and universities.
The letter proposed attempting to cut gun deaths in half by 2020, by banning assault weapons, tightening safety regulations, funding research on gun violence, and repealing laws that ban physicians from discussing gun safety with patients.
On a final note,
The New York Times editorial board takes on sky-high airfare prices:
Oil prices have fallen by about half since June, making it much cheaper just in time for drivers to fill up their cars for Christmas travel. But the decline in oil prices has had made no perceptible difference on the cost of flying. Fares are up from earlier this year, and many airlines are still levying significant fuel surcharges on the tickets they sell. [...] As they have become more financially sound, airlines have increasingly flexed their political muscle in Washington. Earlier this year, airlines were pushing Congress to change how they are allowed to advertise fares. Under current regulations, airlines are required to tell customers the total cost of flights, including taxes. But the industry wants to advertise pretax airfares so that consumers would only see the total cost of a ticket at the time of purchase. [...]
On Sunday, Senator Charles Schumer, Democrat of New York, said the Departments of Justice and Transportation should investigate the unwillingness of airlines to reduce fares and remove fuel surcharges.
But it doesn’t take an investigation to figure out that higher airfares are the direct result of reduced competition. Consumer advocates clearly warned that allowing mergers like the 2013 American Airlines-US Airways combination would harm consumers. This is exactly what is now happening.