Chuck Todd seems to think that torture is A-OK and not something that is fundamentally disgusting, and opposing it just a crazy left-wing position. Digby explains:

Did Chuck Todd recently attend a Mark Halperin seminar on how to be an insufferably obtuse purveyor of stale and useless insider conventional wisdom? (Or does he just have a natural talent for it?) Check this out:

Competence And Ideology: One reason why intelligence has become such a tough nut for Obama to crack: There's a lot of Democratic rhetoric on intel from the presidential campaign, and it's something that Obama is allowing the intellectual left to have veto power over. Obama finds himself caught in this first intra-party vise between his instinct to pick competence over ideology. His first rumored choices for CIA were competent picks -- but both would have been eviscerated by the intellectual left because of their anger at Bush over interrogation practices. He's allowing ideology to trump competence for the first time in one of his major appointments. Now, the pick of Dennis Blair to be DNI is a tip toward competence, while the Obama folks hoped Panetta was a compromise between competence and ideology (Panetta was praised as a smart manager during the Clinton White House years). But it looks like it ain't being received that way...

Apparently being against torture is now a crazed left-wing ideological position built on "anger" at George Bush. And it's incompetent, to boot. I don't know how many times people have to make this point, but when it comes to torture it is not a matter of being mad at bush or even simple human decency. It is a matter of competence as well. Not only does torture not work as an intelligence tool, the sincere and public repudiation of torture is essential to the success of Obama's foreign policy. If he were to choose someone who was implicated in or associated with Bush's torture regime, his credibility around the world would be damaged before he even begins. It would be dramatically incompetent for him not to make a clear distinction both to the intelligence community and the rest of the world between his policies and the Bush administration's...read on

In the mind of a Villager, torture is a civilized practice that is both just and competent. That was very frightening to read. Bill O'Reilly would be proud.