We're at the Phantom Menace stage

For those of you keeping score, mark up another notch in the intellectual implosion of American conservatism: this post at National Review's The Corner essentially amounts to the claim that Americans are OK with torture because they were OK with Han shooting first in Star Wars. And this is all in the context of torture and the show 24, whereas one might have thought that torture should be discussed in the context of actual cases of torture -- a category that is not lacking after 4 years of the war on terror. Unfortunately, our new torture theoreticians don't even have the wit to to argue that Americans would be OK with torture as long as they could visualise the person being tortured as Jar Jar Binks. January 2009 still seems a long way away.