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Where the heck did I deny that progress has been made or that the world is black and white, or that there aren't levels of severity.
All I'm saying is that whether there have been worse things in the past has absolutely nothing to do with how bad something else is. Rape is not less of a bad thing because at some point in the past we engaged in human sacrifice. All that changes is the prioritization of which bad things get the most attention. Yes, in a world where we are simultaneously dropping nuclear bombs on innocent civilians and waterboarding, the former is what you stop first. But that doesn't make the waterboarding any less bad, just less of a priority.
Yes, it is a good thing if an issue gets resolved allowing us to move to the next item on the list. But that doesn't diminish the importance of that next item.
(And again, as was my original response, the specific example provided by sleepyjeff is not one where any actual progress has been made. The moral questions about the neutron bomb remain open and unanswered and not irrelevant since our previous possession of them and stated willingness to use them in certain situations has contributed to widespread Arabic conspiracy theories that we have, in fact, used them; particularly in the first Gulf War.)
And all of that is relatively a side discussion because the charge by Olbermann is not that the administration is using waterboarding. Everybody acknowledges that the administration is using it. That is why Mukasey couldn't answer the question, saying what everybody knows would open us up to war crime prosecutions. I'd say that when you're having to hedge to avoid war crime charges, then we've gone down a bad path (but no, not as bad as the Holocaust). And worse, per Olbermann's view, is that the administration is not only using torture when they know it isn't reliable but using it because they know it is not reliable and will provide the tool by which we are manipulated.
That, if you accept the argument, is the great threat and the big evil in question. But there was once a time we ate the flesh of our enemies to gain their powers, so things really aren't that bad.
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