Phil Musser is not claiming to be a national security expert—he just plays one on TV. And in this midweek appearance opposite Lawrence O’Donnell, Musser, another of those ubiquitous Republican strategists, says that he can walk through Guantanamo and spot the evildoers just by looking at them.

Based on that gut reaction, Musser is “not afraid to go the distance” to keep evil at bay—which, of course, means he, like most Republican mouthpieces out there, is pro-torture.

Mixed up in all of this are two possible windows on the soul of the Republican party and the principles that guided America’s so-called “war on terror” for the better part of eight years: Either they went with their pathetic yellow bellies—their gut—instead of going with their brains (possibly because they were too small to be functional), or they did use their brains, understood what torture would get them, and they were very content with that possibility. Either the general anti-science bent that permeated the Bush Administration caused them to discount the cold, hard, and oft-repeated fact that torture gets you unreliable information, or they knew what a reverse-engineered SERE battery would produce—a broken detainee open to producing anything the interrogator wanted in order to stop the pain—and were actively pursuing such a result.

Either ugly, or seriously uglier—you decide.

And what other gruesome conclusions can be drawn from this week’s parading pachyderms? See anything especially stomach-churning. . . anything else?