Presumably this is the same Guantanamo Bay where, according to the latest reports, detainees have “gained an average of 20 pounds” thanks to a generous “high-calorie diet.” Gulags have never looked so good.
Moreover, while Democrats have long clothed their disdain for Guantanamo Bay in the raiment of moral superiority – this being the presumed upshot of their concern for the constitutional rights of would-be terrorists – the near-unanimous Democratic vote against the Military Commissions Act has exposed it as a cynical ploy to score political points against the Bush administration. For months, Democratic leaders had pointed to the dissent of several Republican Senators – John McCain, Lindsey Graham, John Warner – as conclusive proof that the Bush administration’s position on the treatment of detainees was insupportably extreme. Then all three backed the Military Commissions Act, a compromise of sorts; the Democrats opposed it still.
The reason was the act’s allegedly draconian stance on torture. Sen. Pat Leahy of Vermont described it as “something that may have happened under the Taliban, something that Saddam Hussein might have ordered or in the fiction of Kafka.” That reality is altogether different: The act specifically prohibits torture, defined as the infliction of “severe physical or mental pain or suffering,” and imposes strict punishments – including the death penalty – for interrogators who perpetrate it. What it does permit – and what Democrats like Leahy apparently cannot abide – is a wide range of aggressive interrogation techniques for terrorist suspects.
Summing up the Democratic Party’s position on such techniques last week, Rep. Dennis Kucinich said: “This bill is everything we don’t believe in.” No Republican spinmeister could have put it better.
So what do the Democrats believe in? To the extent the Democratic Party has a governing philosophy, it might be described as reflexive oppositionism. Its central insight is that whatever bruises the Bush administration is good politics, national security be damned. This goes a long way toward explaining why 174 House Democrats voted against a June resolution “[s]upporting intelligence and law enforcement programs to track terrorists and terrorist finances.”
On its face, the resolution seemed unobjectionable. But for one detail: It also condemned the “disclosure and publication of classified information that impairs the international fight against terrorism” – that is, the periodic leaks that have been the Democrats’ most useful tool in what has increasingly become their raison d’être: attacking the Bush administration.
And not just the Bush administration. To judge by the revolt in the Connecticut primary against Sen. Joseph Lieberman, one of the few Democrats with undisputed credentials on defense matters, national security hawks no longer have a place in the Democratic tent.
With midterm elections just weeks away, the Democratic Party’s commitment to the War on Terror remains very much in doubt. The Democrats have announced their intention to make the election about war – class war. According to the Wall Street Journal, Democrats intend to harp on the gap between the rich and the poor. It’s unlikely to work. Not only has such rhetoric paid few political dividends in the past (the ill-fated populist platforms of Al Gore in 2000 and Sen. John “Two Americas” Edwards in 2004) but there are many reasons to think that security matters rank higher on the electorate’s list of concerns.
To be sure, there are some Democrats who, at least in principle, grasp that reality. “I fear that there are those who place a strategy for winning elections ahead of a smart strategy for winning the war on terror,” Sen. Hillary Clinton recently declared.
Inconveniently, she made those remarks after voting against the tougher provisions for terrorist suspects established by the Military Commissions Act, while her dig at the folly of political opportunism conjured up nothing so much as the modern Democratic Party.
