Fox News and the Difficulty of Consensus

I was saying the other day that large-scale punishment for the perpetrators of Bush-era war crimes is less important than establishing some form of political consensus that torture is wrong for the future. A decision to kind of wave hands and say “well, it was a crazy time” would disappoint me, but the really important thing is to try to change the dynamic where we essentially have a lot of politicians saying that if it were up to them we’d go straight-away back to doing more torture. This is why it’s great to Senator John McCain back to fighting the good fight on the torture issue:

Nevertheless, as Neil Sinhababu observes, the existence of a large and powerful conservative media apparatus will make the emergence of an anti-torture consensus quite difficult:

But I don’t think that we’re going to be able to establish any such consensus anytime soon. It used to be that we were worried about Fox News defeating us in elections, or beating the drums for another Bush Administration war. Winning by big margins is nice, because we don’t have to worry about those particular horrors for at least a little while. But now we have to worry about how Fox and the rest of the right-wing noise machine are going to continually sustain a substantial minority of crazy people, preventing the formation of an anti-torture consensus, an anti-war-of-aggression consensus, and anti-warrantless-spying consensus. Even if there’s majority support for these views, anybody scrapping for power within the Republican Party will find reason to oppose them, just to get a majority of Republicans.

Indeed, in addition to Fox News you have The Wall Street Journal running pieces arguing that waterboarding is not torture written by a guy who knew waterboarding was torture quite recently. It makes for a depressing situation.