Kit Bond is retiring from the Senate.

Before torture became fashionable--and legal--Kit Bond was one of only ten Senators sick and amoral enough to endorse Dick Cheney's abominable bill that would have authorized the CIA and the President to torture terror suspects. Ten Senators. Out of a hundred. Ninety decent men and women refused to vote for that outrage.

But that was about a year BEFORE the Military Commissions Act, which eventually DID give our Pervert-in-Chief the 'legal authority' to allow waterboarding, extreme positioning, threats, etc to obtain questionable intelligence. It passed with a comfortable margin, but it accomplished the exact same goal Cheney's bill tried to earlier--legalizing torture ordered by George W. Bush.

Against every international law on the subject, including the Geneva Conventions, which is, last time I checked with a constitutional scholar, a treaty that TRUMPS any mere statutes passed by Congress. When a law contradicts another law, there are precedents long ago set that determine which has the right to overrule the other. Treaties are the highest laws in the land, yet they are routinely ignored or tossed aside if inconvenient--especially by conservative Republican Presidents.

I'd been hearing rumors for months now that Bond was going to retire. He looks ill. He probably is. I'd also heard rumors that he would resign immediately, and at the last second outgoing extreme conservative Republican MO governor Matt Blunt would appoint his own father, Roy Blunt Jr, to the remainder of Bond's term. Blunt is politically dead, so it couldn't send his image any further down the toilet if he did that.

We'll just have to wait and see, and this scenario has just an outside chance of becoming reality.