Yesterday and today on MSNBC, Joe Scarborough and Pat Buchanan have been vociferously defending the 12-part Republican torture program because it "works." Well, of course it works. So do concentration camps, secret police, and total surveillance. Hey, wait a minute, we're getting those too.

My favorite moment was this morning, when Pat said: We have a conflict between the moral law and the positive law. Go, Pat! I said. Then he added: the moral law allows torture and killing to protect innocent life, and the positive law forbids it. That is, of course, the reverse of the truth.

So I turned to another channel owned by the merchant of death, General Electric: CNBC. On Squawk Box, one of the guys was denouncing Obama for not pushing Bush's managed-trade treaty with Colombia, "our only friend in Latin America. Our only friend!" This is a show that is supposed to be concerned with markets, but what this guy meant was: the only government in Latin America that takes CIA orders. I wish it were. But why aren't our friends, say, the Latin American business people with whom our business people trade? If we need to put it in governmental terms, our friends are the free-trade countries. And I don't mean those who have been bludgeoned into the empire's managed trade. "Yankee go home," some say. Well, me too. Back to your lair in DC. Stop molesting the world and Americans too.