Andrew Sullivan's imagination

Have you ever taken a sentence or two and expanded on it into several paragraphs... kind of like many of us did in college for filler. Well imagine doing it with someone else's words, but in addition to expanding, you're changing a simple truism into an evil complexity. And if you happen to be so talented to do so, you have thus successfully completed professor Sullivan's course in professional writing: Paradigm accommodation: saying what your adversary really meant to say.

I present to you a simple statement, from Dick Cheney:

Capture one of these killers, and he'll be quick to demand the protections of the Geneva Convention and the Constitution of the United States. Yet when they wage attacks or take captives, their delicate sensibilities seem to fall away.

And from several paragraphs, the gist of what Dick Cheney really meant to say, courtesy Andrew Sullivan:

Invoking Geneva and the Constitution in a time of war, Cheney implies, is only something terrorists or terrorist-supporters would do.

Wow, I am gobsmackingly impressed. Enlightened are we to now know the true and dark nature of Dick Cheney. A powerful man standing firmly against the U.S. Constitution and the Geneva Convention.

Sullivan stops just short of saying we're fighting the wrong enemy and should be fighting the likes of Dick Cheney, or maybe that's what Sullivan really meant to say.