Vanity Fair editor Graydon Carter recently requested that arch-contrarian Christopher Hitchens get in on the torture debate, Plimpton-style. Ever the badass, Hitchens accepted.

The only two qualifiers I would offer are: 1) as far as the real thing is concerned, it pretty much begins exactly where this demonstration ends, and that, 2) the truly awful thing about torture is the loss of autonomy and personal will. So such a demonstration, while salient, remains just that: a demonstration.

Hitchens' article on the experience: Believe Me, It's Torture

UPDATE: a good companion podcast to the subject, courtesy of Philosophy Bites:
Raimond Gaita on Torture

Gail Sheehy's Vanity Fair piece "Hillaryland at War" is a must-read for political junkies.

I'll give credit to Sheehy. How can one NOT read a piece about Hillary's campaign that starts:

Are you here for the Deathwatch?"...That was how my friends in the traveling press corps welcomed me into the bub­ble of the Clinton campaign plane. It was three days before the March 4 Democratic primaries in Ohio and Texas, and they were boarding the 737 with the sullen obedience of inmates after an outing in the yard. Some had been following the once inevitable front-runner since the January 3 Iowa caucus when she was first pronounced to be in a "slump."

Vanity Fair has produced a Blogopticon classifying blogs on two dimensions:

1.  Earnest v Scurrilous, and

2.  News v Opinion.

Here on Daily Kos, if we don't like what's going on we can diary about it.  If we still don't like it, we can end our involvement. This site is not a journalistic one -- it's a place for the exchange of opinions and information, and alerts to relevant news and events among people with similar interests and often similar views.  And it belongs to one person with strong opinions, no matter how involved the rest of us are.  We all know that, accept it if we want to stay and, at least in my case, enjoy interacting with this strongly biased and passionate-advocate community.  
Huffington Post is similar in that it's the progeny of one person, and her views and preferences are what count.  However, it differs greatly from Daily Kos in that it presents itself much more as a news site (though a liberal one), and has journalists and supposed journalists reporting and running certain sections.  One of those supposed reporters is Mayhill Fowler.

Just as a follow-up to this diary by Billary Redux last night, HuffPo  has finally released the tape where Bill shoots off at the mouth.  As you now know, Bill was responding to a question/s asked by Mayhill Fowler regarding this article by Todd Purdum for Vanity Fair.

Yep, I think unity can be achieved.

Update:  I received an email from someone claiming to be Michael Wolff pointing out that I use 'Richard' several times in this essay.  Ooops!  He got me!  Chalk it up to a bad pain day.  Most of you know I'm usually vigilant when it comes to details like this - but sometimes, when the pain gets really bad, the back of my brain takes over.  I was thinking about the TV pundit Richard Wolff (the Wolff I know best).  It just came out - and for that I am sorry.  If I'm eviscerating the man - I should at the very least get his name right!

So thank you MICHAEL Wolff for the correction.  That took courage.

Whoa.  Forget the Hannah Montana pics, those are the most boring part of the magazine.

Get the new Vanity Fair for a truly amazing photograph of Bobby Kennedy riding with Deacon Jones.  

Then read all about Daily Kos in James Wolcott's article.

This is my favorite part.  A quite accurate portrait of our beloved watering hole. I'm nearly done with this diary, so it's almost time for me to finish my laundry.

At Daily Kos, a tempo of urgency prevails.  Its thermostat is set to the heat of the moment; its readers and posters believe in taking action and leaping into the breach, even if it means postponing a trip to the kitchen or retrieving wash from the dryer.

The article focuses on the rift between the Clinton and Obama camps, and if you get offended by really harsh analysis of Hillary's campaign from a mainstream magazine, you won't want to click over and meet me after the break.

Click To Enlarge

By Dan Calabrese/North Star Writers Group

Via ThinkProgress, Vanity Fair has a new article out on torture that is definitely worth a read. In it, Phillippe Sands attempts to trace to origins of the use of torture by the United States, starting as early as 2002 with some of the first detainees at Guantanamo Bay.

Was it coincidence or conspicuous of Vanity Fair, to have their February 2008 Proust Questionnaire be our favorite Etch-A-Sketcher, Karl Rove?

He, of election infamy and New Math on the eve of the Iowa Caucus?

After reading Carnaki's excellent diary, and the Vanity Fair article that went with it, I have seen my blood pressure rise to unprecedented levels.  I have never been this angry, ever.  The ice in question, from  truck RU-89, went in my mouth.

Well, it could have.  I have no way of knowing.  Anybody familiar with my ACWS series know I was in Iraq at that time, so I very well could have ingested the cadaver flavored ice.  

All I know is that they used us.  All us veterans of this misbegotten war.  They sent us to Iraq, and then they profited from our pain and suffering and death, and then they couldn't even bother to give us clean fucking ice.

At this point in the rule of George W. Bush and Dick Cheney, I thought I had reached shock fatigue. We've seen illegal invasions, torture, unprecedented levels of corruption, a warrantless wiretapping on a nationwide scale, and an erosion of national credibility on everything from the environment to the rule of law.

Yet this morning I read a story that filled me anew with fresh outrage and I think exemplifies the horrors - the absolute horrors - of this administration and the political ideology behind them.

The latest Vanity Fair includes excerpts from a book about to be released this month called For the Love of Politics - Bill and Hillary Clinton by Sally Bedell Smith.  I read it Friday night as something to put me to sleep, oh dear, this book is anything but that.  I know nothing about the author, but am glad the timing is before the  primaries are over and not after them.

Here is the story from November 2007's Vanity Fair: The White House Civil War.  Here is a synopsis:

Promised real power as Bill Clinton's vice president, Al Gore found he had a rival for that role: the First Lady. And when Hillary decided to run for the Senate, a tense competition got ugly. In an excerpt from her new book about the Clinton White House years, the author reveals how conflicting agendas—the triangle of a scandal-ridden lame-duck president, the wife he'd betrayed, and his designated successor—sapped Gore's 2000 campaign as the bond between two couples dissolved into distrust, anger, and resentment.

While the corporate media steers clear of reporting on the spoils of the Iraq War, Democracy Now! has been following up on a current Vanity Fair article written by Pullitzer Prize winning authors James Steele and Donald Barlett (http://www.corpwatch.org/... ).

The Department of Justice is actively covering up massive fraud, into the billions, by Halliburton and its subsidiaries. They are using the regulations of the whistleblower investigation to do this. And the Halliburton connections go deep into the DOJ. For instance, Vinson & Elkins, Halliburton's legal counsel, gave Alberto Gonzales his first job as a lawyer.

There is more. A lot more.

Get out your shovels and follow me past the fold.

Okay, perhaps the title is a little overly suggestive, but lets take a look at what they are each doing as of late.  Before we go any deeper, props to NYPopulist on his great Gore diary below.