WATERBOARD THIS

Following the attack on the Turkish airport, Donald Trump again called for waterboarding terrorists—and worse—with an eye to preventing future attacks.

I have to think this is mostly a slap at the Obama administration, the folks who called for a stop to enhanced interviewing techniques.

Trump is theorizing about all the excellent intelligence this country would have, but for Obama's mishandling of the situation. (Bleeding heart liberal, and all that.)

And theorizing is the right word.

There's no actual evidence we'd be any safer if we were still jacking around in the crap of random Muslims, looking for clues to the future.

As for stopping the Turkish airport attack, who the hell does Trump want to waterboard now? Maybe pry some chunk of human beef out of a terminal light fixture and have a go at it? No help there, I'm pretty sure. No, you'd have to ask the ISIS commander who sent those guys, and it's likely even that guy would not know the exact moment of the attack.

That someone might attack the airport is not news. No one need change into dry clothes for that information to come out. The world is packed with soft targets, and everybody knows it. The only solution is to be vigilant, everywhere and all the times.

Even so, it would probably not hurt to offer rewards to landlords who rent to standoffish young fellows dabbling in stinky chemicals. Might get some leads there.

Deploying nuclear aircraft carriers to hostile waters and launching sorties of fast-movers laden with smart weapons costs a crapload of money. Maybe some of that dough, deployed as reward money in hostile neighborhoods, could loosen up the intelligence market.

The sort of terror leaders Trump would have us torture are instead being killed in drone attacks and the like. Dead guys launch no missions. As for plans already in place, there are better methods of uncovering them than splashing water on a highly motivated soldier of Allah.

The fact is, the current level of terror violence will not wane until deeply religious folks get permission from church authorities to be less religious.

In the mean time, fighting violence with violence only begets revenge violence, over and above the violence called for in the holy books. But you have to do something, right?

If Trump is looking for somebody to waterboard, he could do no better than to raise his own hand. It may be the only way to find out what he really plans to do to solve the country's problems—aside from "we're going to take care of it and it's going to be great."

On the other hand, for torture to work, the guy beneath the dripping towel actually has to know the answers you seek. Can anybody be sure Trump has even an inkling of an answer to any of it? This may be something even he doesn't know—and won't know until he's forced to face the matter square on.

Somebody get a bucket and maybe we can find out.