The Democrats' Big Play

We guess this is what the president calls "Change you can believe in." Oh, to be sure, he said that he's opposed to hearings, but make no mistake about it, it's his call. Or maybe it isn't. Maybe he's so beholden to his backers, he's out of the picture, as difficult as that is to imagine.

Anyway, it was amusing to see a Democrat from the sovereign state of Texas, Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee, saying that looking back is looking forward, actually. Her Orwellian declaration neatly summed up the Democrat conundrum. The President has promised a new era of bipartisanship. He's pledged to break with the politics of the past. The proposed kangaroo courts say otherwise. Slick Willie and Swift Boat Kerry had similar problems with the fanatics who comprised their base. As the memos unfold, we'll see how Obama handles it.

Too bad for the Dems, public sentiment is against treating stone killers with kid gloves. If Gallup could have spun its latest poll to show otherwise, it would have done so in a heartbeat. Think of Monday's unannounced fly-by of Ground Zero and Lady Liberty in a backup of Air Force One. The D.C. air-brains who dreamed this up wanted a photo op, panicking Lower Manhattan, forcing the evacuation of thousands, tanking the stock market, and, worst of all, enraging our peevish mayor. Imagine if former President Bush had pulled this kind of stunt.

Anyway, the Beltway wing nuts did us a favor. They unintentionally showed what these pages have been saying all along: The elitist powers that be are utterly out of touch. Normal folks haven't forgotten the September 11th terrorist attacks. Not at all! Health care, global warming, and walking for transgender rights are not at the top of their shopping lists. People are security-minded.

So our heart bleeds for those poor journos, toiling for peanuts across the fruited plain. They have their work cut out for them. Imagine being a fly on the wall of some Kremlinesque editorial office and having to defend the ludicrous claims that harsh interrogation is wrong, doesn't work, is unreliable, and may be unnecessary, given the present advanced state of airport security. Oh, and that the best course of action is to go easy on the ruthless, fanatical, avowed enemies of Western civilization.

"Do you take your coffee with whole milk, skim or half and half, Mr. bin Laden? Two sugars or Sweet'N-Low? And a bagel and shmear. Right. Was that plain or with poppy seeds?"

So imagine you're at the Politburo Star, and your P.C. boss, Big Mother, who reads cards from the old girls club in the backrooms of the Daily Kos and Huffington Post, is demanding to know who's writing the torture editorial. No one looks up. You know someone has to regurgitate the Inner Party line and do it with a straight face, but please, not me.

Now maybe 95 percent of ink-stained wretches are loyal Democrats who agree with everything the President ever thought or said, but not everyone is quite as loopy as the congresswoman from Haight-Ashbury, Nancy Pelosi. No, being a reporter these days is not as easy as it looks. It's not enough to make up quotes and letters, fabricate stories, cook your polls and data, and falsify your expenses. You also have to be able to put on a poker face at a moment's notice.

Question for the Big Easy school of interrogation: If your child were kidnapped and held for ransom by cutthroat terrorists, and one of the miscreants were picked up by the police, how far would you want them to go to find your baby? Would you want them to smack him like a cue ball until they got more English, or would you want them to apply the Power-mad Pelosi Pressure Points?

"Man, you're in a world of hurt! Rat out your comrades in Pakistan or else, tough guy! Spill or we'll dump your latte! Ever gonna taste a Starbucks frappuccino again? No way! You like their gift cards and organic brownies? Forget it! What's the chance you'll ever make it to a Broadway show? Slim and none unless you cooperate."

This is the left's big play: It must convince people not to believe their eyes and ears but to watch The Magician's hands. Keep your eye on the cape and crystal ball; wave the wand and voilà!

The dreaded waterboarding that's at the bottom of this kerfuffle is so cruel, inhuman, and unconscionable that it's been regularly used in the SERE program for training American military personnel since the end of the Korean War.

SERE is an acronym for Survival, Evasion, Resistance, and Escape, and is useful for soldiers in war zones with a high risk of capture. How awful!

But let's pretend that we give up harsh interrogation altogether. Will America's image take an uptick? Did Hitler's and Stalin's henchmen treat their prisoners more humanely because we abided by the Geneva Conventions? Did General Tojo's? No way. They simply didn't care.

All in all, we view this as politicizing national security. Why not release the memos that show whether the interrogation techniques were successful? Khalid Sheikh Mohammed only said that he planned to hijack a jetliner and crash it into a building in Los Angeles.

The top Democrats were all at the waterboard briefings: We say subpoena Pelosi and ask her what she knew and when she knew it, and why she didn't object at the time. Was it that being kind to terrorists was not politically expedient post-9/11? That the Speaker of the House was pandering? And that the Democratic leadership has compromised national security, demoralized the CIA, and seriously miscalculated the pulse of the people?

Do they think that America is immune from attack and that their Dear Leader is immune from the vindictiveness of show trials when he's out of office? Do they think that his complexion is his protection? What if thousands die from an assault that might have been prevented by serious interrogation? That's what they're gambling on with their latest antics.