Trust

These two op-eds in the WSJ belong together.

This one, on the Torture Gambit of the Democrats, should be read in conjunction with The Supreme Court Goes To War.

Both go to show why the Democratic Party cannot be trusted, not in a time of war and fundamentally not at all.

The Democrats cannot afford to attack the President and his war policies directly: they know that the ice here is much too thin to support them. So rather than that, they are dedicating significant resources to go after the people who implemented these policies, fully aware that they - the congressional members of the Democratic Party - were instrumental in approving those policies.

This is the height of hypocrisy.

What this is designed to do is not stop the President's policies, but rather it is nothing less than a venal act of revenge. Revenge, perhaps, for their own failings and their own lack of backbone - if they were truly opposed back then, they lacked the backbone to stand up and oppose - but it is nothing less than that.

Once proposed by the President and approved by Congress, laws become the parameters under which people work. If the laws are changed, then policies must perforce change, but if the law is that - the law - then you cannot reasonably expect anyone to second-guess whether the law will be changed and hence policies that were lawful then become unlawful. You cannot run a political and legal system on the basis of retroactive laws, laws aimed at punishing those who carry out policy (and did not decide it). Or, rather, you can try to run such a system, and get a system that will not do anything, literally, because those charged with carrying out the policy will not dare act because the chilling effect that retroactive jurisprudence would have.

This isn't law, this is a travesty of law.

And it is being done to placate groups like MoveOn and the other crypto-fascist left-wing groups that are now apparently the core of the Democratic Party.

I first registered as a Democrat, and to my eternal shame I voted for Carter the first time I ever voted.


The Democratic Party has long abrogated its trust with the American people, subservient as it is to moneyed interests and its self-destructive policies. The Democratic Party has blocked oil exploration and refineries because they want gas prices to go up to appease their watermelon faction (green outside, red inside); they want the US to be humiliated by failing in Iraq; they want Iran to be the dominant power in the Persian Gulf; they want Chavez to be able to export his revolution, especially to Columbia (why else would Pelosi block the trade agreement with that country?).

And the Democratic Party is also the party of judicial activism, of which we have now seen the worst of its kind in a long, long, long time. Giving enemy combatants civil rights in war time is, in its idiocy,  tantamount to disbanding the police in a major city and replacing them with therapists who counsel criminals how to better get in touch with their feelings and why they break the law. Anarchy and chaos is the theme here, and once this percolates down to the troops, there will be changes as to how any war is fought.

If the law is stated that prisoners must be read Miranda rights, that evidence must be gathered and documented, that no lethal force be used without documentation of the need therefore, then there will be no prisoners, there will be no wounded, the troops will manufacture the evidence and will grow contemptuous of their officers and those who are so foolish as to send them into battle.

Or there will be no battles: this makes military operations impossible, for any officer ordering his troops into battle who then fails to provide the necessary documentation for each and every enemy casualty will then be prosecuted for failing to uphold the law.


The law is, in this case, an ass. Of course, that is the mascot of the Democratic Party, and rarely, rarely has it been so well deserved.


Let me repeat: The Democratic Party cannot be trusted. Any attempt to change the law in order to retroactively punish your political opponents is reprehensible and vile. It is aimed at destroying the rule of law, not upholding it, and for that the Democratic Party richly deserves its fate.