Putz's look back on 2003, revisited.

An astute reader writes,

I was as steamed as you were at Glenn Reynolds' dishonest, self-serving "What I Got Wrong" post.

I was especially curious that he was patting himself on the back for being (unlike Oliver Willis and Radley Balko!) anti-torture. Pointing this out is not really in the spirit of the exercise, is it? He could look back at his position on, say, Hans Blix and say he was wrong. Since there were no WMDs for Hans Blix to find, Reynolds was wrong to repeatedly smear Blix as a fool or a stooge.

But torture? It's a question of moral values, not exactly a question of fact. Obviously, it's just there because he thinks it's cute to smear a couple of anti-Bush bloggers as torture supporters. It's similar to the same way that he likes to pretend that Atrios and Josh Marshall were pro-rubble before he was.

It's curious, though, that he doesn't say that he's against torture unlike George Bush, or Dick Cheney, or Donald Rumsfeld, or Alberto Gonzales...I might be being unfair- I didn't read them all- but I couldn't find any point at which he approached the sentiment, "I stand against (some member of the Bush Administration) on this issue, because he promotes torture." Nor did I find any posts with the sentiment, "I was (say) listening to Rush Limbaugh, and I was disturbed that he seemed to think that torture was a big joke."

Rather, if he says "I'm anti-torture", it's virtually always a throat-clearing before an attack on an anti-torture voice whom he deems to be too anti-Bush, or too politicized, or whatever. He refuses to criticize pro-torture politicians or pundits, while constantly shushing anti-torture ones. It's odd that an opponent of torture would spend all of his time attacking other opponents of torture, trying to convince them not to speak about torture, while giving a pass to those who think torture is brave, or patriotic, or funny. But by any fair reading, he's been far, far more concerned with protecting the Bush administration from a fight over torture than he is about the actual torture.

Yes, the nonpartisan does love him those Bushies.