Whats So Funny Bout Bush, Lies and Torture Memos?
By LISA MARTINOVIC When an ACLU email directs you to a Stephen Colbert take on torture, you know it’s time to reassess the news-as-entertainment phenomenon. Colbert was riffing on the Justice Department memo advising the CIA that its agents could legally use waterboarding and other so-called harsh interrogation techniques if they had an “honest belief” that their actions did not cause severe pain-even if that belief was “unreasonable.” Colbert has a gift for spinning conscience-shockers like this into satiric gold. But is that a good thing? At the level of our media saturated group-mind, political jibes, by their very ubiquity, make familiar the unacceptable. The more familiar a circumstance, the more likely it is to become entrenched, and the harder it is to change. From this perspective, might the pervasiveness of political satire unwittingly serve to normalize the very practices it would condemn? This line of inquiry started to gel a few years ago as I listened to my savvy ten-year-
