More Data

Republicans are busy demonstrating more of their concern for the weakest among us.  The minimum wage is now at its lowest point in about 50 years.  Despite that, their top legislative priority is the further reduction (if not total elimination) of the estate tax.

Meanwhile, more stories of torture, some of them implicating the president himself.  This excerpt comes from a Washington Post review of Ron Suskind's new book, The One Percent Doctrine (hat tip to Kevin Drum):

Abu Zubaydah, his captors discovered, turned out to be mentally ill and nothing like the pivotal figure they supposed him to be....Abu Zubaydah also appeared to know nothing about terrorist operations; rather, he was al-Qaeda's go-to guy for minor logistics....And yet somehow, in a speech delivered two weeks later, President Bush portrayed Abu Zubaydah as "one of the top operatives plotting and planning death and destruction on the United States."

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Which brings us back to the unbalanced Abu Zubaydah. "I said he was important," Bush reportedly told Tenet at one of their daily meetings. "You're not going to let me lose face on this, are you?" "No sir, Mr. President," Tenet replied. Bush "was fixated on how to get Zubaydah to tell us the truth," Suskind writes, and he asked one briefer, "Do some of these harsh methods really work?" Interrogators did their best to find out, Suskind reports. They strapped Abu Zubaydah to a water-board, which reproduces the agony of drowning. They threatened him with certain death. They withheld medication. They bombarded him with deafening noise and harsh lights, depriving him of sleep. Under that duress, he began to speak of plots of every variety — against shopping malls, banks, supermarkets, water systems, nuclear plants, apartment buildings, the Brooklyn Bridge, the Statue of Liberty. With each new tale, "thousands of uniformed men and women raced in a panic to each...target." And so, Suskind writes, "the United States would torture a mentally disturbed man and then leap, screaming, at every word he uttered."

It seems to me that when we assess the moral status of this administration, we are increasingly left with the stark fact that the only plausible case for its consistency with Catholic teaching relies almost exclusively on its positions on stem cells, abortion, and homosexuality.  The question then becomes how much of this can be justified in the name of those three issues.