The problem is, during what turned out to be merely a pause to set up the punchline, I actually was thinking about our war dead, and so were a lot of others. Left and right, we all believe, or supposedly do, in honoring the sacrifice of our servicemen and women.

Here, Hollywood is letting its mask slip. Ferrell and his director Adam McKay are so confident that everyone shares their contempt for Bush that they slosh over into contempt for all things associated with Bush: the show includes cracks about Texas, Christianity, and finally the military.

Roy Edroso has a little bit of fun with this, but it almost makes me nostalgic. The “Bush=Troops” equivalency was a foundation of our political discussion these last seven-odd years, as omnipresent as “Meet the Press.” Attacks on Bush’s judgment were interpreted, on the cultural right, as attacks on brave American soldiers, marines, sailors. This strikes me as quaint not just because Barack Hussein Obama is now the commander-in-chief of those men, but because no one in America now believes that Bush didn’t fumble some element of the war in Iraq. Sen. John McCain’s comeback in the 2008 GOP primaries was more or less predicated on that argument.

Obviously, a big part of Democratic strategy over the next four (or 40) years will be to remind voters that they disliked George W. Bush, and why they did so. A big part of Republican strategy will be bragging that this congressman or that senator actually opposed Bush, as Rep. Mike Pence (R-Ind.) said on “Meet the Press” yesterday. You can see why supporters of the ex-president still want to pivot off any discussions of how Bush failed, even if it’s a joke from the guy who starred in “Melinda and Melinda” and “Semi-Pro.”

So it’s surprising when Daily Kos diarist EmperorHadrian hinges off a blithe line in the First Read story — “some critics says [sic] he had line authority over controversial decisions involving interrogation and detention” — and says “as far as we know, Kappes has not objected to the torture policies he enabled.”

Let’s have an uncomfortable conversation.

The most serious charge against Kappes, as best I can tell, comes from his role in the abduction and rendition of Abu Omar, the Egyptian cleric taken by the CIA off the streets of Milan and tortured in Egypt. A 2007 article from The Chicago Tribune about the rendition reports briefly that Kappes was “one of those who signed off on the Abu Omar abduction.” (h/t TalkLeft.) No doubt that’s troubling. Extraordinary rendition is legally and morally problematic. Italy is prosecuting in absentia the CIA agents involved in the Abu Omar rendition.

But we really don’t know from what’s publicly available the context of Kappes’ decision. Was this something that his bosses demanded? Did he have decision-making authority on the rendition? (The Chicago Tribune piece is extremely complex, as much of this is murky.) What were the alternatives to handling Abu Omar? What did or didn’t Kappes know? I’m not saying this is exculpatory, necessarily. I’m saying that we should investigate before we reach a conclusion.

More broadly, though, there’s a tendency in the blogosphere to presume that the Google-able corpus of knowledge on torture is a definitive account of our government’s dalliance with it over the last decade or so. That’s just not the case.

The frustrating thing about intelligence reporting is just how dense and murky and opaque it is, and very few people who do it are able to create comprehensive accounts of what goes on. That’s why it’s necessary to hedge conclusions. A piece I’ve chased for years concerns internal CIA resistance to torture. I’ve confirmed very little of it, which is why I’ve not yet published anything. But if it pans out, I think it’s fair to say that it would complicate much of the picture of what people inside the agency did and didn’t resist, and how and why they did it.

This is partially why I keep calling for an independent congressionally-mandated investigation. There’s just too much that’s unknown to label individual CIA people torturers as a general proposition, so take it easy on that front. Reality-based community and all that.

The Obama campaign didn’t exist to make me feel good, and the Obama presidency won’t either. I don’t especially like his people punching the dirty [flipping] hippies under the bed, but on the other hand if they manage to convince people that Obama is a sensible centrist who wants to do sensible centrist things like build SUPERTRAINS, get out of Iraq, not torture people or invade random countries, strengthen labor protections, reduce income inequality, improve education, provide health care for people, and reduce poverty, while those DAMNED DIRTY HIPPIES just won’t shut up about their magic ponies, it’s fine by me.

For years we’ve had Democrats railing against those crazy hippies as an excuse to not do all of those things. If Obama’s people are going to rail against the hippies and use it as an excuse to do them, fine with me. If.

Obviously, the media is making far more out of this Democratic divide than exists in the real world, but critics would be well-served to wait and see how Obama actually governs before freaking out about how he’s ignoring progressives. If it turns out that he totally sucks or flails completely and doesn’t deliver any of this stuff, which I’m kind of doubting will be the case, there will be four years to criticize him, with good reason — and then you can vote his sorry butt out of office in 2012.

But the post-partisanship that Obama campaigned on requires concessions from the left as well as the right, and if Obama’s strategy does prove successful for implementing even a few of the things on Atrios’ laundry list — especially considering the disastrous path the country appeared to be on for the past 8 years — it will be hard to argue that sacrificing a liberal Democratic cabinet for the greater good wasn’t worth it.