John Hinderaker has made the remarkable claim that:
Many liberals don’t just want to defeat conservatives at the polls, they want to send them to jail. Toward that end, they have sometimes tried to criminalize what are essentially policy differences.
The “policy difference” Mr. Hinderaker refers to is the comment President Obama made:
President Barack Obama said Tuesday the United States lost "our moral bearings" with gruesome terror-suspect interrogations and he left the door open to prosecuting Bush administration officials who vouched for their legality.
In other words, President Obama has acknowledged that the legal arguments used to justify torture may have been, well, wrong. And thus, arguably, illegal.
Mr. Hinderaker seems to think that torture constitutes merely a policy difference, and not an actual crime. Furthermore, as Mr. Hinderaker talks about “criminalizing conservatism”, his statement involves a conflation of torture and conservatism – that to be conservative means supporting torture.
Given that torture is currently illegal in America, illegal internationally, and there are popular conservatives who don’t support torture, Mr. Hinderaker’s conclusion seems to reach somewhat his premises.
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