The folks who perpetrated this crime are still on our TVs and in our newspapers daily, but many are talking about the period in question as if it were simply another dark chapter of U.S. history, like the years of Jim Crow, the internment of Japanese-Americans or the war in Vietnam. That’s certainly true to some extent, but for understanding the present moment, I’d argue, it’s misleading. Because the thing about chapters is that, eventually, they do finish: Jim Crow is dead (though so many vestiges of the era, of course, remain), the internment of Japanese-Americans is seen (by most) as an outrage and the Vietnam War has come to an end. But as Tuesday’s edition of MSNBC’s little-watched but supposedly influential “Morning Joe” has already shown us, the torture era of American history isn’t definitively over. In fact, it might be just temporarily paused.

I already felt this way once it became clear that President Obama would do nothing to hold the torturers of his predecessor’s administration accountable; and my conviction was further strengthened back in 2008 and 2012, when Mitt “double Guantanamo” Romney surrounded himself with advisors who reportedly urged him to bring back torture as president. But those were quiet moves, the kind of stuff only political obsessives and journalists notice. Former Bush campaign spokeswoman and current co-host of “The View” Nicolle Wallace’s performance on “Morning Joe” Tuesday morning, however, was anything but quiet. And besides reaffirming my belief that anything involving “The View” is bad for humanity, Wallace’s comments showed how for most if not all of the GOP elite, torture is now just another partisan issue.

So here’s what Wallace said on Tuesday, while gabbing with her buddies on MSNBC: “”In the history of this country, I think months after 9/11, there were three people who we thought knew about imminent attacks and we did whatever we had to do.” Having misled viewers into thinking a huge, secret and continent-spanning torture regime was actually just focused on merely three suspected terrorists (no biggie; what’s a little waterboarding between friends?), Wallace added, solemnly, “I pray to god that until the end of time, we do whatever we have to do to find out what’s happening.” It was “asinine” and “dangerous” to claim that systematic torture “makes America less great,” the person who’d just implied god supports torture said. All that matters, Wallace argued, is whether torture “help[s] us kill people who want to kill us.”  But liberals, she complained, want to focus on “political correctness” — i.e., not committing war crimes.