Huckabee’s “Own Personal Hero” Strikes Again

If I approved of violence against anyone at this site besides that Osama bin Forgotten guy, I would say that Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia deserves a head slap or two (or three) for these observations noted here…

(Scalia) said Tuesday that some physical interrogation techniques could be used on a suspect in the event of an imminent threat, like a hidden bomb about to blow up.

In such cases, “smacking someone in the face” could be justified, Justice Scalia told the British Broadcasting Corporation. He added, “You can’t come in smugly and with great self-satisfaction and say, ‘Oh, it’s torture, and therefore it’s no good.’ ”

I’ll tell you what, Your Honor; stop watching "24" for awhile and take a look instead at this article from The Washington Post, in particular this excerpt...

When it comes to torture, however, the handbook advised that "the threat to inflict pain . . . can trigger fears more damaging than the immediate sensation of pain."

"In general, direct physical brutality creates only resentment, hostility and further defiance," the (CIA counterintelligence interrogation) manual said.

Intense pain, interrogators were taught, "is quite likely to produce false confessions concocted as a means of escaping from distress."

And did you think Scalia was actually done? Why, of course not…

(He also) ridiculed European criticism of the death penalty in the United States.

“If you took a public opinion poll, if all of Europe had representative democracies that really worked, most of Europe would probably have the death penalty today,” he said.

I’m not even going to try and diagram the thought process behind a statement like that, but I’ll only note that I never thought I’d get an opportunity to link to the Sunday New York Times Magazine article of January 27th by Parag Khanna titled “Who Shrank The Superpower” (haven’t actually gotten all the way through it yet – maybe someday), but Scalia’s astonishingly stupid remarks give me an excuse to do so here, highlighting this excerpt...

...Europe’s influence grows at America’s expense. While America fumbles at nation-building, Europe spends its money and political capital on locking peripheral countries into its orbit. Many poor regions of the world have realized that they want the European dream, not the American dream. Africa wants a real African Union like the E.U.; we offer no equivalent. Activists in the Middle East want parliamentary democracy like Europe’s, not American-style presidential strongman rule. Many of the foreign students we shunned after 9/11 are now in London and Berlin: twice as many Chinese study in Europe as in the U.S. We didn’t educate them, so we have no claims on their brains or loyalties as we have in decades past. More broadly, America controls legacy institutions few seem to want — like the International Monetary Fund — while Europe excels at building new and sophisticated ones modeled on itself. The U.S. has a hard time getting its way even when it dominates summit meetings — consider the ill-fated Free Trade Area of the Americas — let alone when it’s not even invited, as with the new East Asian Community, the region’s answer to America’s Apec.

Just file this under more misinformation from Scalia, who has a penchant for engaging in this sort of thing every now and then, as he also did here.

Update: Daily Kos blogger smintheus has more here - man, is Scalia "losing it," or what?