Torture Cels

An ultra-conservative talk-show host in Chicago let himself be waterboarded to debunk the idea that such practices are torture. He came out singing the "I've been Tortured" lullaby, unequivocally stating that water-boarding is torture. He drowned as a child, and had to be revived. Waterboarding doesn't simulate drowning, he said: it is drowning.

Further evidence that God has both a sense of justice and irony.

Christopher Hitchens of Slate and Vanity Fair underwent the same experiment and came to the same conclusion.

Gertrude Stein put it best: "a rose is a rose is a rose".

And torture is torture is torture.

Shakespeare wrote that "a rose by any other name would smell as sweet." Unfortunately, the converse is as true: torture cloaked in the semantics of "enhanced interrogation techniques" still reeks to the high heavens like a pig farm surrounded by fields of rotting cabbage.

Not only does torture diminish our stature as a country, it makes us collectively responsible for it.

I wish Ms. Stein had said "wrong is wrong is wrong." Or as I've said many times, "Enough is enough is always enough."

And I've had enough.

More than enough.