You may think that because my comments frequently irritate conservatives that I would be at home among far-Lefties. Well, you're WRONG! And I'll now give you an example.

As previously written about here, there's a guy at work who's a real Daily Kos, Talking Points Memo, Democratic Underground junkie. Despite the fact I hit "refresh" on Time.com at work all day, this guy still recites 10 news stories a day that I haven't heard of because apparently I'm not lingering on partisan Web sites enough. This is the same guy who told me the African pirates were just "kids" who were making multi-million dollar hauls off of passing cargo ships because they had grown up in "abject poverty."

The new thing is he's been reading a book about Dick Cheney that details the former vice president's nefarious doings while in the White House. Yesterday he shared a passage with me that discussed a ridiculously loose definition of torture that some Cheney crony had put into the language of a legal document. Though it was pretty pathetic how shamelessly they tried to skirt international law, I had to say I was on the fence with the torture issue. My feeling is if it will prevent me from finding myself on the 20th floor of a burning building, watching steel beams melt as I consider making the jump, then I don't care if they twist some guy's arm or even damage his pancreas. Fuck him!

My liberal liaison was surprised by my viewpoint. "Don't drink the Kool Aid on the torture issue!," he told me, although he had Kool Aid from the other side running down his chin. "They had to waterboard one of these guys 149 times to get info out of him. Now if you need timely information to prevent a disaster, what kind of method is this?" I'm no expert on torture except the kind I endure working in a call center, but my guess is you don't put a guy on the board and then ask him what's going on in the next five minutes, you ask about broader things like who's connected with who, who's laundering money for who, things of that nature.

"They could just make up answers!," he countered. Yeah, they could, but since you've got an island full of these guys, you can talk to 12 of them and see what parts of their stories corroborate. It may not be perfect, but it's what we have.

"Well it's like with the pirates, I said that someone who was starving might do what they were doing, but you said you wouldn't, so that's a value that you hold. Now, if the United States says, 'We do not torture,' and that's a value of ours, what does this make us look like?" That's simple: there's one thing that is the official policy that's stated at the UN and put on posters and spread in speeches, and then there's what really goes on, and that is, anything that holds this country together. Like in our own call center they hang up these posters that say, "We appreciate you!," "You're a star!," "Thank you for all you do!" But your daily reality tells you that's bullshit PR because you're getting messages asking why you went to pee for three minutes, or signing something saying you understand your job is in jeopardy because you put the customer on hold without saying "may I". Anyone can figure out there's always a difference between what's said and what's really going on.

"Then where does it stop? If we say it's okay to torture these guys, then the next thing it could be us!" Of course! And that's already begun, I said. Really, people could save themselves a lot of time by just reading and listening to George Carlin. I was struck by something he said when he hosted the first-ever Saturday Night Live in 1974. He was talking about the bag searches at the airport and he said, "They're trying it out at the airport for now, but they'll be doing it everywhere soon." There's also a piece in his book When Will Jesus Bring the Porkchops? where he writes, "Hello. We're the people who control your life...What do you think is going on with the Social Security cards? And the security cameras?...Now go back to sleep." Even what I'm typing here is being posted on a network devised by the Department of Defense, and is stamped with my ISP and computer number that can be pegged to my exact address. When I search for girl-girl porn later that will be recorded somewhere, too. The home office knows you checked Mein Kampf out at the library for a book report in 11th grade, and there's a file that shows you TiVO'd Monday night football. So as long as all this is going on, you may as well get some good out of it, right? So let's torture some info out of guys with Derek Smalls mustaches.

That conversation took place on my break, but now that I look back on it, we covered a lot of ground in that time. I'm pretty impressed with my answers, too.