The torture transition

Bush 41: "he passed the test." Did he?

Here's Yglesias:

The oddity of terrorism as an enterprise is that, in essence, it’s an effort by a weaker party to trick the stronger party into weakening himself by engaging in panicky overreactions. In particular, though 9/11 had an appalling cost in terms of lives and money we’ve actually seen a somewhat larger cost in lives and much larger cost in money in our response to those events.

And Fallows (who lives in China):

On matters of policy, he revealed himself to be as isolated and out of touch as his critics (including me) would have assumed all along. Two illustrations: he hotly challenged the premise of one question that his policies had made America less prestigious and respected around the world, saying that was just the view of some "elites" and other pantywaists in part of Europe. Go to China! he said. They still respect us there. Yes, sort of. As I've written many times in the Atlantic, China does not seem in any deep way "anti-American," and they generally think US-China relations are good. But no thinking person has the slightest doubt that the Iraq, Guantanamo, and Abu Ghraib policies, in particular, have hurt America's image badly here as they have in most other places. To say what the President did indicates how carefully he has been protected from any unfiltered feedback from the real world.

This is clearly a failure.