When Did America Become A Bunch of Bastards?

A passingly interesting article about John McCain on the campaign trail is up over at the New York Times.

The article sees McCain come in to a coffee shop in middle America, and without getting into all aspects of the political spectrum, he starts condemning torture. And Joe Sixpack in Middle of Nowhere, Iowa, has the stones to disagree with McCain.

For one, I find it darkly hilarious that a bunch of middle Americans disagree with McCain on torture. The one man who can speak to the futility of torture from first-hand experience, from five years (five goddamn years) of torture in Vietnam, is called into question; meanwhile, the guy from Law and Order, who thinks torture is OK, isn't being questioned. As you can see, this makes total sense.

I just have to ask: when did America become a bunch of bastards? When did torture become something we ever wanted to let happen even in rare circumstances? When did we join ranks with the darkest, most perverse swine that human history has ever produced, by allowing torture, by allowing the idea of torture, to even be considered?

Torture makes us the equals of Pol Pot (Cambodian madman, "Brother Number 1," all told responsible for more than one million deaths; see our peer's handwork here), of the Spanish Inquisition. Torture makes us into the bloodthirsty monsters that the people who hate America want us to be.

When did we become a bunch of bastards? America was firebombing Vietnam and Cambodia in the name of democracy well before we were invading countries in the Middle East in the name of, oh, uh, democracy, again, I think. So our government have been bastards for a while. But when did Joe Sixpack in an Iowa coffee shop become a bloodthirsty, pro-torture bastard? When did the American zeal for pain and hate equal that of the bastards who boarded those planes on that September morning six years ago?