"If we can blow them up, then we can do whatever we want to them"

That is the logic Victor Davis Hanson uses to declare waterboarding a "dead issue":

Waterboarding, which once sparked a liberal furor, is now a dead issue. How can anyone object to harshly interrogating a few known terrorists when routinely blowing apart more than 2,000 suspected ones — and anyone in their vicinity?

That's always been a stupid argument, no less so now that Dick Cheney has used it. Since we vaporized lots of Japanese women in Hiroshima and Nagasaki and boiled lots of Japanese women in Tokyo with napalm, does that mean it would've been okay for General MacArthur to force Japanese women to serve as "comfort women" for American soldiers? Of course not. Likewise blowing up enemies on the field has no moral bearing on whether it's legitimate to torture them in confinement, i.e., after they have been rendered non-threatening.

Hanson in general has gone to seed in the last few years. Most of the Right has moved on from the disastrous Bush administration, but Hanson must continue to defend them and the failed neocon enterprise. He despises the Obama administration but won't admit that the catastrophic failure of the Bush administration led to the Obama administration.