Pot-au-feu

You can replace every mention of "Guantanamo" in Michael Gerson's article with "Bergen-Belsen" and you'll get a general sense of the type of individual its author actually is.

As a genre, these sorts of evil-but-necessary apologia are as predictable as the failure of the Pittsburgh municipal government to clear the PJ McArdle Roadway after snow and just as vexing. Now, I am not going to play the liberal hand-wringing game, bemoaning the betrayal of "our" values. The problem posed by Guantanamo and its even eviler brethren around the world is not that it is un-American, but that it is inhuman.

I am no great believer in natural law. The idea of a core of transcendent rights whose basic forms just so happen to correspond to the conventions of Western legal traditions strikes me as not only philosophically dubious, but essentially silly. And yet insofar as individual human consciousness seems to exist, conscience seems to dictate that we respect it. I admit this is not the most rigorous conceptualizing of the inviolability of the individual, but it strikes me as the most compelling despite its limitations. Only extraordinary necessity gives a human community the right to violate the autonomy of another human being, and the more intense the violation, the more extraordinary the required necessity. Gerson and his ilk argue that that is precisely the ethical calculation at play in their defenses of the concentration camps, but their arguments are self-refuting. How many times does Gerson mention "symbolism" and "symbols" in these little missives? "Symbolism, it turns out, can be costly, even dangerous." It's a statement entirely lacking in content. It doesn't mean anything. So . . . we don't want to send a symbol, because it is dangerous, because terrorists understand symbols, so we must symbolically maintain a different sort of symbol, which we cannot undo, for in the undoing is the dangerous kind of symbolism . . . The mind reels, the brain relents. This shit makes tautology look like the proof of the Poincaré conjecture. It's the opposite of moral reasoning. It's too stupid to be ruthless and too ruthless to be sentimental. It's mush, the soft and flavorless end of an empire turning into a boiled chicken.