True enough

"When we go under, Western Civilization goes under."

I guess it depends on how you parse that.

When we go to the dark side, we take western civilization down with us. You can't argue with that - though I doubt it's what Mr GOP Candidate Tom Tancredo meant.

If we reject our values, what have we gained? Mere survival.

That's pretty Darwinian for a bunch who don't believe in evolution. Didn't their guy say "He who lives by the sword will die by it"? As Sarah Vowell once said:

Whenever I hear the president mention, oh, every 12 minutes, that his greatest responsibility is "to protect the American people," the insufferable civics robot inside my head mutters: "Actually, sir, your oath, the one with the Bible and the chief justice and the Jumbotron, is to protect and defend the Constitution of the United States. For the American people are not mere flesh whose greatest hope is to keep our personal greasy molecules intact; we, sir, are a body politic -- with ideals."

That's what we used to believe in. That's what Western Civilization used to mean.

As John Dean said on TCR: If you want to be a great country, you can't torture people.

updated 18 May: In the LA Times today Rosa Brooks makes this same point. As she puts it,

In Tuesday's debate, Tancredo brushed off "theoretical" objections to torture as a luxury we can't afford: If "we go under, Western civilization goes under." And what's a little torture when Western civilization itself is at stake?

But Western civilization isn't about speaking English, or flags, or football or borders. If Western civilization is about anything at all, it's about the arduous, centuries-long struggle to nurture an idea of human dignity that's not dependent on nationality or power. As Petraeus put it, there are some "values and standards that make us who we are."

Tancredo's right about one thing though. If we embrace the use of torture, we won't need to worry that extremist Islamic terrorists might destroy Western civilization.

We'll have killed it off ourselves.

I'm indebted to her for id'ing the guy who said the line. I honestly couldn't bear watching it again to gind out.