Slippery Slopes

Will

Will writes from Washington, D.C. (well, Arlington, Virginia). You can reach him at willblogcorrespondence at gmail dot com.

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18 Responses

  1. M.Z. says:

    I remember reading a person talk about how police agencies used to look askance at applicants with crew cuts, because police work was about more than enforcement, and these applicants would bring a military mindset to the job. If you noticed, Officer Crawley had a nice crew cut. So in short, you better believe the military bleeds into the police force.Report

    • Will in reply to M.Z. says:

      Not exactly a comforting thought, M.Z.

      To be sure, I think police departments should be able to recruit veterans. But absent some sort of widely-recognized rejection of torture, I worry that ‘enhanced interrogations’ will become a feature of domestic law enforcement.Report

  2. Mr. Prosser says:

    It is not only torture but the seemingly day-to-day abuse and bullying of those originally stopped for questioning. Mouth off or appear even slightly uncooperative and “street justice” takes over. What was once a winking acceptance of enforcement in the ghetto is moving into mainstream policing.Report

  3. Jaybird says:

    Yep.

    Let it out to sunlight. “This is what we did. This is who we did it to. This is who did it.”

    We wouldn’t even need to prosecute, after that. Everything would be out in the open.Report

  4. Bob says:

    Better known as police brutality.Report

  5. Michael Drew says:

    No need to add the ‘retroactive’ modifier to ‘prosecutions,’ at this point still in any case. We don’t have a Department of Pre-Crime — all the crimes we prosecute still take place in the past.Report

  6. mealworm says:

    The slippery slope goes the other way too. Charles Graner, of Abu Ghraib infamy, was a prison guard in Pennsylvania.Report

  7. Roque Nuevo says:

    My first reaction to this was an exaggerated eye-roll

    Your first reaction was correct. Usually further reflection just confuses things, as in this case.

    Naturally I’m on the side of all right-thinking people of good will on the torture issue. That’s not the point. The point is Sullivan’s dragging Bush/Cheney into a local issue that has absolutely nothing to do with with them.

    How can one read this and not cringe? Sullivan proclaims a sudden illumination into

    the actual attitudes and beliefs of a segment of American society, the part that strongly disapproves of Obama…

    Are we-who-disapprove-of-Obama to be openly called racist scum by such a poor excuse for a human being as Sullivan?

    Sullivan is truly an embarrassment to read because of his fixation with Bush/Cheney/Palin, etc etc. His hysterical style of moral preening is way beyond embarrassing. His constant pontifications are suitable for the Pope. I guess that this is somehow what Sullivan is shooting for as a so-called liberal Catholic. After all, how much can one trust the judgment of someone who believes that some god was born by “immaculate conception” two thousand years ago to redeem humanity—which stays stubbornly unredeemed after all those years?Report

    • Jaybird in reply to Roque Nuevo says:

      Dude. You go from complaining about Sullivan bringing Cheney into a local issue to bringing the Catholic Church into a Sullivan issue.

      Do one.

      Do the other.

      Doing both elicits the aforementioned eyerolling.Report