September 28, 2006
Abandoning our prinicples to make opponents look bad
Today our Congress approved one of the worst assault on our Constitution ever legislated. The bill that Our Fine President will soon sign into law with his usual level of flourish gives him legal cover for all the fun he’s been having with terror detainees for the last five years. It abandons our regular rules of law, steps back from international rules of war and even abandons the centuries old concept of habeas corpus, also known as the right to petition against imprisonment by the state.
Our Congress approved a bill that while specifically prohibiting the mutilation or rape of detained terrorist suspects, will allow the president to decide what other interrogation techniques are appropriate. The bill allows the government to convict terrorists on evidence the defendants are not allowed to see and allows evidence gained through torture to be admitted at trial. Basically the bill says in our war for the future of civilization, our enemies will not be afforded the benefits of our civilization’s legal system. That’s one heck of an example for us to set if we’re hoping to win people over to our view of the future of civilization.
The law really just codifies all the dirty little secrets that have come to light about what has been going on in our war on terror for the past five years. We’re told the law is needed because now we can hold trials for these evil evil men, but that’s just a cover for us to put on a little show before we put on a little execution. A civilized culture would never kill anyone unless they could prove how awful they were. It’s good thing we’re allowed to torture people in order to get evidence against these evildoers, otherwise we’d never be justified in such righteous killings.
Of course the timing of this bill is all about politics. There’s a big Congressional election coming up in a bit more than a month and the party in power’s record of ineffective policy and unsuccessful violence has them on edge. Rewriting all the rules so we can hold some big fun terror trials will play well in their efforts to look really tough in the face of an enemy. At it’s core, this bill is about Republicans finding a new way to call their Democratic opponents weak. Twelve of the forty-four Senate Democrats voted in favor of the bill, but the entire party will still be smeared for opposing such a necessary assault on our nation’s founding principles.
Our Fine President was at just that game today. In a fund-raiser speech he said, “Five years after 9/11, the worst attack on the American homeland in our history, Democrats offer nothing but criticism and obstruction and endless second-guessing.”
I guess from his point of view it looks like endless criticism and obstruction, but the disorganized Democratic party isn’t even really up to that. Sure it’s easy to criticize and second guess Our Fine President when so many of his predictions are wrong, his plans fail and his denials of reality grow more galling by the day, but the Democrats aren’t doing much of that. They didn’t filibuster to prevent passage of the bill or stand up as a group and walk out on a vote they knew they couldn’t defeat. They spoke out against the bill a bit but did nothing to stand in its way, and still they’ll get blasted as weak obstructionists.
Our government is sadly run by people with an us against them mentality. The Republicans view everything in terms of what can make us look good and them look bad. As the party in power shouldn’t they look at things in terms of what is best for our nation as a whole? If they did I don’t know how they could support a bill that so thoroughly abandons the moral high ground our nation once enjoyed.