While his Shrubberiness is seemingly having his way with Congress when it comes to spying on citizens, he's still having some trouble getting the Senate to come around to his new definition of torture. Here's where it stands now: the Geneva Conventions define torture as "outrages upon personal dignity, in particular, humiliating and degrading treatment", while Schrobbe wants that changed, for the sake of clarity, to treatment that "shocks the conscience".
Let's examine this for a minute. Aside from the clarity issue, which speaks for itself, there are several surprising revelations in this latest language. The first and most obvious: the torture experts at the CIA have not only located the consience, but have figured out how to hook electrodes to it and have incorporated it into their torture techniques! This is big news, although I doubt we'll be getting the details anytime soon. The CIA probably wants to keep these new methods to themselves for a while, before exporting them to Uzbekistan and Saudi Arabia. Perhaps in the not-so-distant future, the location of the conscience will be leaked to reporters, along with details on required voltage, and possible variances in conscience size between people of different faiths (my uneducated guess - Hindus have the largest consciences, with Catholics a close second).
Perhaps the more shocking revelation, though, is that the Torturer-in-Chief himself would prohibit these amazing new techniques! Imagine the frustration of the CIA torturers - their boss wants to take away the new toy almost as soon as it comes out of the box.
I'm no political expert, but I think that the Democrats have just had their mid-term election slogan handed to them: Republicans: Soft on the Conscience, Soft on Terror.
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