Bush Vetoes Bill Banning Torture

Did you think he wouldn't?  Of course, being a metaphorist after George Lakoff's heart (in a sense), he said that "Waterboarding," especially, is a "tool" (or perhaps he said "technique") that the CIA, particularly, must sometimes "employ" (or "practise").  The real question (la grant question, as Francois Villon might have said) is why he bothered to say even that.  The answer, I think, is that you're not really running a terrorist state unless you let the world know--at least a little bit--that that's what you're running; in a word: advertising.  Nice people don't know (don't want to know) about these things, but a necessary and effective part of the Torturer's Art is the preliminary Display of the Instruments of Torture.  It helps too (as well as, ahem, gratifies) if you have a nice selection of pictures of current or previous victims of your work--such as the Nazis always had, such as School of the Americas graduates send to the families of their victims, such as those from Abu Ghraib.  

On a more serious note, Italy's Court of Cassation has recently ruled that Italian women have the right to lie to the police about their extra-marital love-life, if the truth would "harm their reputations among friends and family."  Very sensible. The same august body has in the past ruled that a pat on a woman's ass does not constitute sexual assault "if it is brief and spontaneous," and that a woman wearing tight jeans cannot, properly, be said to be the victim of forcible, in-the-nooky rape, "because her cooperation is required in getting her jeans down or off of her."  A young woman who protested that she had, despite the careful reasoning of the Court, been raped on a lonely road by her driving instructor, got the last judgement reversed. But grave doubts remain as to how he did it:  Did he beat her or threaten her with violence?  Was the car parked?  How big was the car?  Were they in the car? or in the road outside the car? or beside the road outside the car?  When he was unfastening and pulling down her jeans (and she was not cooperating), was he using one hand or two?  How had he secured her so that, without her cooperation, he could unfasten, pull down, and/or remove her jeans?  Did he tie her up?  Hold her down with one hand, while with the other hand he unfastened, pulled down and/or removed her jeans? Were they, in any sense, embracing?  Had they been embracing?  At what point did he penetrate her?  In what position?  When did he bring out his penis?  Was it erect the whole time?  Did he simply unzip his pants, and bring it out through the fly?  Or did he take down or remove his pants?   Was he wearing underwear?  Was he wearing jeans? Were they tight?  I, for one, think the Court's original judgement well founded.