Sorry to be mooching off of a front page post, but I had a lot of thoughts on this thing and I've condensed my rant here.
We're really talking about a culture-war issue here rather than a national security one, where Limbaugh's dead-end listeners don't want to torture to keep us safe, but want to torture to become the kind of country that tortures people.
And the story is that Limbaugh is going after Obama for not torturing suspects, arguing that Obama's expansive definition of 'torture' is just like NOW's expansive definition of domestic abuse. And somehow, erring away from torture charges and domestic abuse charges are important priorities. Because really, torturers and abusers are the most valuable American citizens there are. Fuck you, Rush.
Seriously, though, I want to elaborate on this a little bit more: Rush isn't making this comparison because he thinks it's an apt analogy. He's making it because he wants to remind you that his beliefs not only support lenient treatment for wife-beaters and torturers, they actually endorse and support spousal abuse and torture.
In the brief period in the early 2000s where we were all scared and thinking seriously about torture in a political context, there was a national security argument to be made. And while I firmly come down against torture in a national security context, at least it's a debate worth having. To summarize: torture by and large doesn't work in terms of getting valuable intelligence, and it's an act of cowardice to sacrifice the ideals that make America a fine nation in order to gain a brief illusory moment of security. Some guy had something to say about that. Benjamin somebody.
But that's not the point here. There's no national security analog for tying domestic abuse to torture. The reason to do that is that Rush is expressing a raw, festering hatred that exists in some dark corners of the American psyche, where he simply wants people to feel pain. People who don't conform to his vision. He and his listeners want to torture Arabs and Muslims simply because they're sadists, and enjoy the pain in others. They're looking to national security to justify their own desires to see pain inflicted, and 24 can only offer so much satisfaction. The ex post facto justification applies to domestic abuse: abusers don't want obedience, they want power and to enjoy their sadistic urges. Limbaugh's not justifying torture and acknowledging it as a tragedy, he's justifying any hope that it might work as an opportunity to cause pain.
I think the key bringing this analogy together is how sexualized the violence was at Abu Graihb. The torture there was clearly being doled out by sadists having 'fun,' rather than operatives looking for information, and Limbaugh was having a jolly cock-stroking time watching it and talking about it. Sexualized violence is at play just as much in domestic-abuse situation, and obviously, it frequently degenerates into straight up rape. That current members of the GOP endorse marital rape is evidence of this all staying on the same page. It's about pain, dominance, and a deeply disturbed political movement.
And that's why fundamentally, torture has moved from being a national security issue to another front in the culture wars, between an increasingly marginalized right wing that relies on hatred to froth up a few votes, and a left that pushes for more tolerance, more freedom, and less violence. Limbaugh and the right are endorsing violence not as an unfortunate necessity, but a social good to be sought out as an expression of masculinity, whether by military types against Muslims (asserting American masculinity over Arab) or by abusive partners against their wives (as a straightforward endorsement of patriarchy).