Ok. I realize that there aren't very many progressive and/or Democrat Lindsey Graham fans out there. For the uninitiated, Lindsey Graham is the Republican senator from South Carolina. More notoriously of late, he was a member of the moderate "Gang of 14" that averted the Nuclear Option. My parents live in South Carolina and while they are definitively NOT Republicans and have NOT been fans of Graham's in the past, their opinion of him has softened in the past months as he has been taking a fair amount of wingnut heat for his moderate actions.

I saw him interviewed on Hardball tonight - I only caught a couple of minutes of it, and the subject was torture and the treatment of detainees. He gave the most cogent, thoughtful opinion on the subject. I have to paraphrase because the transcript is not available yet, so although I am block quoting, the words are only from memory:

Torture and its use doesn't say anything about them [the terrorists - it says something about us. We don't have to become them to defeat them.

He came out strongly and unequivocably against torture and didn't once invoke (although it's a reasonable argument) the argument that if WE torture, our soldiers will be tortured... He made his argument on purely moral grounds and on the basis of what torture says about US if we commit it. I give him much respect for that, despite the fact that I may not agree with him on other things.