Did I miss something?

So I was listening to the radio again yesterday and I heard something which made me a bit confused. And it wasn't the first time that I heard this particular news story either, but after the election and exit polls I became more confused then ever.

First let me preface my remarks, I support our troops, and I think that most of the ways that our country is representing itself overseas (especially since the tsunami) has been for what we perceive as the common good of the world as a whole.

I can support that, but I won't support the President. And I have serious issues with the people that voted for him on the basis of Moral Values. The radio news that I heard, NPR again, talked about how the White House was involved in the work in trying to sidestepping of torture guidelines defined in the Geneva Convention. There was a two year period during which the current administration advocated a memo, stating that causing as much pain as possible, is OK, as long as the person being interrogated does not suffer organ failure or death. The only reason that the issue came to light is that someone leaked the memo, and last week, some time around the first of the year, they rescinded the memo. And replaced it with a different memo, stating that the President can authorize actions to be taken in interrogation which are outlawed by US laws.

But one of the major reasons for Bush's win last November, that many news organizations cited was moral values. Does anyone else see some kind of contradiction with this? Sometimes I really don't understand sociology. How can large groups of people be so stupid or just hear what they want to hear, instead of listening to the facts? I saw a bumper sticker a few weeks ago that I think of now: "I can love my country and not love my President." We are the luckiest people alive, to be living in this country and in this time. But it is OK to question our government's policies and decisions. Checks and Balances were written into the Constitution to protect all of us. But who is protecting those Iraqi "detainees" that are being tricked into believing they are being intentionally drowned or buried alive, in the pursuit of "intelligence data"? The news article spoke about how many of the atrocities that Saddam Hussein and his sons committed before they were removed, would have been OK based on the White House's memo on torture. At what point to we become the evil we were trying to protect ourselves from?