A reader sums up my feelings:
I'm beginning to see the Bush/Gonzales intransigence in the face of overwhelming evidence against the use of "coercive interrogation techniques" (let's just call it torture) as just one more incarnation of the Rovian hierarchy of politics-trumps-policy. How else can you explain it? At this late stage in the game, they're still desperate to convince anyone who'll listen that the Bush team will protect America "by any means necessary". It doesn't matter if those means are contradictory, ineffective, un-American or downright inhuman. They're banking on the American people's continuing detachment from and ignorance of reality concerning interrogation and the consequent and pervasive fear this reinforces.
Pitting this fear against such a widespread anti-torture consensus among those that actually do the hard work smacks of the most despicable and cynical politics we've come to expect from Rove. I'm becoming more and more infuriated everyday when I think of how his opportunism has come to define this entire political era. Whenever I've had to give a reason as to why I never have and never will trust George W Bush, the Rove name alone has sufficed.