The US government shall not torture to excess

TJ left a juicy reply on the subject of our spankin' new torture policy, including this:

Even more sadly than hearing the Democrats have capitulated and shrunk from asserting good policy and moral principle, is the realization that they're probably right. By being silent, filibustering now would rightly be seen as extreme political maneuvering--they didn't fight the Bush proposal, but the agreement the Republican moderates got, that's the one the Democrats are fighting? The only way it would have worked is if they'd been outraged from Day 1 and stood behind McCain or held their own PC and said exactly the same thing, only harsher.

Exactly. This should never have been about political calculation for the Dems. Once this became framed as the Republicans arguing among themselves about how much we should torture, and how many fundamental American rights should be taken away from prisoners, the game was over.

I went through about 3 drafts of a reply, wrestling with Blogger's refusal to take blockquote html tags, until I realized it had already been written better by somebody else anyway:

A few days later, when the terror caused by the executions had died down, some of the animals remembered--or thought they remembered--that the Sixth Commandment decreed "No animal shall kill any other animal." And though no one cared to mention it in the hearing of the pigs or the dogs, it was felt that the killings which had taken place did not square with this. Clover asked Benjamin to read her the Sixth Commandment, and when Benjamin, as usual, said that he refused to meddle in such matters, she fetched Muriel. Muriel read the Commandment for her. It ran: "No animal shall kill any other animal without cause." Somehow or other, the last two words had slipped out of the animals' memory. But they saw now that the Commandment had not been violated; for clearly there was good reason for killing the traitors who had leagued themselves with Snowball.