Yesterday I delivered up some of that hideous crap that Maureen can dish from time to time. It’s so dispiriting to see Dowd use her national platform to propagate mindless, banal DC-heather claptrap, and it’s fun to deride her with a healthy dose of snark.

But in the interest of fair and balanced coverage of the Gray Lady’s Op-Ed page, I give you 25 words from Nicolas Kristof (subscription only) today:

Do I really have the right to complain about torture or extra-legal detentions in China when we Americans do the same in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba?

I don’t want to exceed fair use, but he makes a compelling argument: the case of a horribly treated 50 year old Chinese woman; how Kristof and all Americans have lost the moral authority to speak out against such abuses because of the torture policies of Bush and Cheney; how, after he confronted an official from Yunnan Province over this woman’s torture, he replied, “If you Americans ever faced the threat of chaos, you would do just the same…”; and the brutal, sickening reminder of how prescient this official’s warning was:

The moment we did feel a threat, after 9/11, we held people without trial, and beatings were widespread enough that more than 110 of our prisoners died in custody in places like Abu Ghraib, Bagram and Guantánamo.

There’s a poignant moment at the end of the column where he calls for justice for an al-Jazeera cameraman, Sami al-Hajj, who has been held - and beaten - in Guantánamo for five years.

There’s nothing partisan in what Kristof wrote. He is a connoisseur of the obvious, but it needs being said over and over again: the current administration has authorized, condoned, and promoted torture. Torture is now officially sanctioned policy of the United States. Heckuva job Bushie, Cheney, Gonzales, and your enablers in the government (Dems included) and the media.

Thanks for calling bullshit, Nick. Keep it up.