When you're right, you're right.

This video is from Fox "News", and I apologize in advance for that. Still, it's important for what Jesse Ventura is saying. I'm not a big Jesse fan, but he makes some great points here. Unlike his right-wing interlocutor, he has the honesty to call torture for what it is. Naturally, the wingers want to make out that he's being all soft and gooey on the terrorists, but he gets it exactly right:

If we’re not going to be a country that goes by the rule of law, whether it’s convenient or inconvenient, then what do we stand for?

I’m not worried about their welfare, I’m worried about what our country stands for.

The reason I bring this up, though, is that it came up in a conversation on FaceBook. Another liberal friend posted the video, and a local conservative extremist commented that she had listened to Ventura, and that he was a loony who believes in conspiracy theories.

So if you want, go back and watch the video again. There's nothing loony in there, it's all based on documented fact. There are no conspiracy theories; he's talking about what we already know: that people being held by the armed forces of the United States were tortured on orders from the highest levels of the government. No conspiracy, just fact.

There's more than that, though. Conservatives like to claim that they're patriots, but they're really not. They think that if you object to torture being committed by our government, you're loony. It's we liberals who are the patriots. You see, we believe that our country is better than this. When we criticize our country, we are calling upon our leaders and ourselves to live up to our highest ideals.

It's the conservatives who think that torture, indefinite detention, and the gross imbalances in wealth and poverty, access to health care, housing, education and other basic human needs, are consistent with their vision of America. If that's the standard you hold your country to how can you call yourself a patriot?