Keith Burgess-Jackson

10-20-87 . . . The [St Louis] Cardinals got back in contention this evening with a 3-1 victory over the [Minnesota] Twins. The Twins now lead the [World] Series, two games to one. Until tonight, I hadn’t rooted for either team. I figured that, as I watched, I would come to sympathize with one team or the other. The main bar to rooting for Minnesota is that, recently, it defeated my Detroit Tigers. How can I root for Gary Gaetti, for instance, when just the other day I was hoping he was dead (figuratively speaking, of course)? How can I get behind Kirby Puckett and Kent Hrbek when they so neatly pummeled my Tigers? It’s hard. Had Minnesota beaten some other team (say, Toronto [the Blue Jays]) in the playoffs, things would be different. I would almost certainly be rooting for them. So tonight I found myself rooting for the Cardinals, despite the fact that this is their third World Series appearance in six years. And they’re underdogs of a sort, since Jack Clark and Terry Pendleton are out of the lineup with injuries. Go Cardinals!

Here, for your Saturday-evening delectation, is a New York Times story about the Republican Party.

Here.

To the Editor:

Re “Senators Clash With Nominee Over Torture and Limits of Law” (front page, Oct. 19):

Michael B. Mukasey, the nominee for attorney general, acknowledges that torture is illegal under national and international law. He will not say, however, what is or is not torture. This allows him to preserve the right to sanction torture by defining it as not torture.

But like pornography, torture doesn’t require a definition. The Mukasey nomination should be voted down. There must be one moral person in this country who qualifies for attorney general, and the Senate should hold out until this person is located and nominated by President Bush.

As an American citizen, I am tired of being disgusted with my government. We deserve better.

Mitchell Turker
Portland, Ore., Oct. 19, 2007

Note from KBJ: The letter writer needs to take a Critical Thinking course. He doesn’t know the difference between intension (connotation) and extension (denotation). Here is the definition of “torture” from the Oxford English Dictionary, 2d ed.:

The infliction of severe bodily pain, as punishment or a means of persuasion; spec. judicial torture, inflicted by a judicial or quasi-judicial authority, for the purpose of forcing an accused or suspected person to confess, or an unwilling witness to give evidence or information; a form of this (often in pl.). to put to (the) torture, to inflict torture upon, to torture.

You will notice that no examples are given. That’s because (1) reasonable people can disagree about which techniques inflict “severe bodily pain” and (2) a given technique (such as waterboarding) may sometimes inflict and sometimes not inflict severe bodily pain. If we tie torture to a technique, or set of techniques, we limit our ability to extract information that may save hundreds or thousands of innocent lives. To his credit, Judge Mukasey refused to be drawn into this silly game by hostile, agenda-driven legislators.