Monday, April 27, 2009
Let's Have The Truth
It's easy being an idiot: all you have to do is pretend that your beliefs make you virtuous and that they don't have disastrous consequences to the very society that, at least for now, tolerates your idiocy. And your hypocrisy- Andrew McCarthy:Also dropped down the memory hole — along with the names of all the Democrats who thought Saddam was a menace who cried out for removal — is what the ambience was like in late 2001 and 2002, when fears of anthrax and suitcase bombs ran rampant, and people on all sides tried to seem tough. Let's tell the truth about all the liberals who went on record supporting real torture, not to mention the Democrats in Congress, when it was cool to want to seem tough on our enemies, who couldn't be too warlike. Then war and tough measures stopped being cool, and "world opinion" became more important. Nothing like statements under oath to revive ancient memories! And rewind the tapes.
Let's get at the truth too about the word "torture," which to different people, means different things. Some think "torture" means standing on the 98th floor of a burning skyscraper and realizing you have a choice between jumping and being incinerated. Some think torture is being crushed when a building implodes around you. Some think torture is not thinking you might drown for several minutes, but looking at burning buildings on television and knowing that people you love are inside them. They remember that being crushed, incinerated, or killed in a jump from the 98th story happened to almost 3,000 blameless Americans (as well as a number of foreigners), and that 125 Pentagon employees were killed at their desks, while many survivors suffered terrible burns. They think the choice between stopping this from happening again by slapping around or scaring the hell out of a cluster of brigands, or leaving the brigands alone and letting it happen again, is a no-brainer.
Not much polling has been done to date about attitudes on waterboarding and torture held by the general public (as opposed to MoveOn.org and the Washington press corps), but it would surely be done in the event of hearings and trials. Not many people think being slapped hard is the same thing as having to jump from a building. Democrats might find the truth about this to be inconvenient indeed......Barack Obama promised to be a nontraditional leader, and in some ways he is. He is the first president to have gone abroad and apologized so much for his country's supposed sins, the first to sit calmly by while his country was savaged by the likes of Nicaragua's Daniel Ortega without making a protest, the first to try to persecute a past administration for its political judgments, and the first to investigate a predecessor and his administration for having been a success.
The first job of a president is to safeguard his country and fellow citizens, which Bush did, to the apparent dismay of the opposition. Usually, an investigation takes place after someone has failed in his duty, to find out what went wrong so that it can be changed and improved on. But no attacks on U.S. soil in the seven-plus years between September 11, 2001, and January 20, 2009, is a record of success. Do the Democrats want to find out what went right, and then change it, to avoid repetition? The way that they're going, they probably will.
By the way, on Noemi's point about the liberals who supported real torture after 9/11 (y'know, back when Nancy Pelosi was green-lighting waterboarding), I recounted in my article yesterday that among them was none other than Bill Clinton — and I could have added that they included Hillary, too, until the realities of a presidential nomination process controlled by the hard Left had her doing a quick 180. After all, with Barack Obama wowing them by his support of infanticide, she couldn't afford to say we might have to harm a hair on the head of an occasional terrorist.
