'Liz Cheney, Showing the Way'

Rush Limbaugh had a very good segment, in transcript at his webpage, about how Liz Cheney, Dick's daughter, has been kicking butts and taking names all over the cable news shows on the enhanced interrogation techniques. Rush zeroes in on how she does it, which is basically to put facts up against cliches and ignorance. The entire segment is worth reading. Rush gave this example of Liz's encounter with Anderson Cooper in a discussion of waterboarding:

She often starts by refusing to debate their cliched, fallacious premises. Here's another example. One more before we go to the break. Anderson Cooper: "More than 100 people are known to have died in US custody, some that were ruled a homicide. If these were tightly controlled things, how come so many people are murdered in US custody?"

LIZ: Anderson, I think that your question is highly irresponsible.

COOPER: Why?

LIZ: Because you are contemplating things that aren't conflated. When somebody dies or is "murdered" in US custody then we are a great nation and we take the people who are responsible and we put them on trial as you've seen happen throughout the last eight years. That is not the enhanced interrogation program, and to somehow suggest that those two things are the same I think willfully conflates something and ends up in a situation where we aren't able to take a truthful look at the last eight years as we go forward, because we are muddying the waters about what really happened.

RUSH: Anderson Cooper's there saying, "What's my next question?" Yeah, he's trying to probably figure out what "conflate" means and so forth. But what she's talking about here, he asked this loaded question, a hundred people died in US custody. And what he's implying is it happened because we waterboarded them or we tortured them. She said, "No, no, no. Your question is fallacious. The premise is irresponsible -- and whenever these kinds of things happen we have prosecuted." All you've gotta... We even prosecute the innocent, thanks to Jack Murtha. The Marines in Haditha. Congratulations, Liz Cheney, showing the way.

I have a video from April of Liz taking on someone named Nora O'Donnell at MSNBC, on the subject of the interrogation memos, about which Ms. O'Donnell knew almost nothing. Notice how Liz just keeps taking O'Donnell's cliches away and re-sets the argument on a foundation of facts.

Watch the video and you can see Ms. Cheney was all primed and ready to respond when Ms. O’Donnell first whipped out the “torture” libel--which Ms. Cheney certainly knew was going to be the main weapon used.

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Cheney Unbound

I’ve been happy to see Dick Cheney taking the lead in contradicting the presidential/media libels about torture and the enhanced interrogations of the al Qaeda terrorists. For years I wished the Bush administration would put Cheney out there as a spokesman to explain Iraq and what we were doing to stop domestic terrorism, but it never happened.

For all the partisan emotion he draws from the left, Cheney is an outstanding speaker. Better, forensically, than President Obama, who speaks in airy generalities and is allergic to facts. For example, Obama said about Gitmo, “We are cleaning up something that is quite simply - a mess - a misguided experiment that has left in its wake a flood of legal challenges.”

Which really is just so much bullshit. The mess was created when Obama paid off an I.O.U. to Daily Kos by ordering Gitmo closed within a year. Even Senator Jim Webb, who hates Bush’s guts, said Gitmo was an “appropriate facility” that should stay open to try these cases.

When Cheney speaks, in contrast, he puts out the facts, always quite specifically, then he links them together with airtight logic. That's why they want him to shut up.

Here’s a sample of what Cheney said during his AEI speech last week:

Yet for all these exacting efforts to do a hard and necessary job and to do it right, we hear from some quarters nothing but feigned outrage based on a false narrative. In my long experience in Washington, few matters have inspired so much contrived indignation and phony moralizing as the interrogation methods applied to a few captured terrorists.

I might add that people who consistently distort the truth in this way are in no position to lecture anyone about “values.” Intelligence officers of the United States were not trying to rough up some terrorists simply to avenge the dead of 9/11. We know the difference in this country between justice and vengeance. Intelligence officers were not trying to get terrorists to confess to past killings; they were trying to prevent future killings. From the beginning of the program, there was only one focused and all-important purpose. We sought, and we in fact obtained, specific information on terrorist plans.

Ever since President Obama released the interrogation memos, the media has gleefully been embroidering its tapestry of legends drawn from the “torture memos,”or more accurately, from the idea of the “torture memos,” which the media can be confident hardly any one will actually read. The legends tell of how the Bush administration commanded its minions in the Department of Justice, the CIA, and the Pentagon to abandon law and institutional morality in favor of a torture regime limited only by the imaginations of its cruellest practitioners.

One idiotic example of, literally, hundreds I have seen in the past few weeks, is Brian Dickerson in the Detroit Free Press this weekend, declaring that “It's true that Cheney. . . has been defending the unbridled use of torture since 2001.”

Think about that for a moment. What would torture look like, what has it looked like, where it’s been “unbridled”?

Apparently, for one of Dickerson’s rose-petal soft conscience, the unbridled use of torture runs the range between being yelled at by interrogators at the easier extreme to being waterboarded at the harsher extreme: waterboarded, by the way, after being medically cleared for fitness by a physician and then having it explained to you in advance that the interrogators have no intention of killing you. No wonder Zubaydah could take 83 doses.

You want unbridled torture? I ran across this passage from Solzhenitsyn describing only some of the techniques practiced by the Stalinists in Russia:

In the intellectuals in the plays of Chekhov who spent all their time guessing what would happen in twenty, thirty, or forty years had been told that in forty years interrogation by torture would be practiced in Russia; that prisoners would have their skulls squeezed with iron rings; that a human being would be lowered into an acid bath; that they would be trussed up naked to be bitten by ants and bedbugs; that a ramrod heated over a primus stove would be thrust up their anal canal (“the secret brand”); that a man’s genitals would be slowly crushed beneath the toe of a jackboot; and that, in the luckiest possible circumstances, prisoners would be tortured by being kept from sleeping for a week, by thirst, and by being beaten to a bloody pulp, not one of Chekhov’s plays would have gotten to its end because all the heroes would have gone off to the insane asylum.

In our American drama, it’s not the detainees but the media who’ve gone off to the insane asylum, whence they submit their turgid editorials about how America lost her values at Guantanomo but might regain them if we accept queer marriages.

That's when I have to keep reminding myself, these are the people who’ve had forty years to define when human life begins and still haven’t gotten started, or who bled barrels of ink about a “Duke rape case” where there was no rape, and about the lynching victims know as the “Jena Six” who not only weren’t lynched, but committed attempted murder against a kid they didn’t know because he was white.

I’m not one of those guys trying to suggest that the enhanced interrogation techniques aren’t horrible, even brutal. I don’t care for Hannity trying to minimize waterboarding by offering to submit to it for charity. There’s no question these techniques are tough examples of the use of force against known enemies. Still, considering that other examples of the use of force include being shot dead by a Marine rifle squad or getting a cruise missile down your chimney, I have to say KSM and his fellow waterboarding alumni got off pretty easy.

The only question is whether or not the enhanced techniques are unlawful torture. And as usual the media has left that question in the dust in their stampede for the higher ground from which they’ll sermonize the rest of us. And answering that question for a concerned CIA was the whole purpose behind drafting the interrogation memos. The hell of it is the only guys in the country who actually made the effort to answer the critical question whether or not these techniques were torture or not--I’m talking about the Office of Legal Counsel attorneys--now have the cloud of prosecution hanging over them.

Meanwhile, moral paraplegics like Dickerson and Maureen Dowd and hundreds of others get to throw around expressions like “torture” and “broke the law” as if they’ve actually defined those terms--which they haven’t, and dare not.

Which is why they want Dick Cheney to shut up.

Fortunately, he's got eight years of shutting up to make up for.

Prepare for Some Serious Liberal Busting of Your Moral Ball Bearings

As someone who’s been opposed to legalized abortion for so long, I’m pretty resistant to liberals posturing that they’re more compassionate than the rest of us, or care more about preventing suffering in others. They aren’t. They don’t. Their sermons to me about how much they care about the poorest of the poor are wasted, when their most heartfelt battle-cry is for the unrestricted right of a strong, healthy mother to slaughter her far poorer and weaker child simply for being unwanted.

The current outrage about the way Khalid Sheikh Mohamed and Abu Zubaydah were interrogated has nothing to do with liberals’ profound compassion for these terrorists as fellow human beings. Nor does it prove they walk a higher moral road than the rest of us, in spite of President Obama’s breathtaking charge that before he came along the country had lost its “moral bearings.”

Saddam Hussein ran one of the world’s cruelest torture regimes right up until the end, and the closest the Left ever came to taking that seriously was when they sponsored American youths to go there as human shields to protect Saddam, Uday, and Qsay from being stopped. When fellow human beings are in the way of what they want, the Left can be as icy, cold, and heartless as their worst feverish fantasies about poor Dick Cheney. Whether it’s the murder of Terri Schiavo, or the rape of South Vietnam in 1975, or the present-day abuse of women (and girls) in Muslim countries, or the slaughter in Rwanda, or the stealing away of the educations of a few poor kids in Washington, D.C., or the forced abortions in China, or the heinous infanticides of George Tiller in present-day Kansas, or the celebration of the murdering police state of Fidel Castro, there isn’t a moral bearing left in the liberals’ tool kit.

Like all participants in political struggles, the Left makes its decisions based on a balancing of interests, always wanting the scales heaviest on the side they’re most committed to protect. That’s why the President, when an Illinois senator, could justify keeping legal the practice of denying a newborn survivor of a botched abortion “health care” and letting it be discarded to die in a trash bin. It’s not that Obama hated babies. It’s just that in his political calculus, he valued so much more the love and political support of pro-abortion radicals, who do happen to hate babies, (or anyone else who might stand between them and their rights under Roe v. Wade).

You may just happen to agree with Obama on that calculus. But if you do, don’t try telling me it’s because you love humanity more than I do.

It’s going to be more of the same with what the leftist media is already referring to as the “torture memos.” (For a short history of media accuracy in naming things, see the “Duke rape case.”)

Opposition to the Bush administration “torture policy,” just like opposition to “domestic spying,” “Bush’s war in Iraq,” “outing Valerie Plame”, “the so-called war on terror,” “tax cuts for the rich,” and on and on, wasn’t really being driven by the exquisitely sensitive conscience of liberals, even though they’ve sickened half the country with their smugness. Those decisions were made by the cold political calculation that a weakened, or better yet, failed, Bush presidency would better guarantee them a return of the White House, in 2004 or 2008.

Okay, so I guess that’s politics. As one of those quotable sorts said once, politics ain’t beanbag. But at the same time, it ain’t Sunday School, either, and I wish the Left would stop acting as if they were Elijah and John the Baptist, Now With Religion.

When history handed to George W. Bush America’s first chance to make a proportional response against jihadist provocation in 200 years, America was united for about six weeks. That ‘s all the time it took before Democrats figured out that Bush and the Republicans would be unstoppable if America saw them actually roll back global Islamic jihadism.

That made the number one mission of the Democrats to do everything in their power to keep that from happening—from marshaling the media to undermine morale at home, to hamstringing our efforts abroad, to criminalizing military and intelligence advisers doing their best to stay within the rules while protecting the country.

It isn’t exactly that the liberals wanted the terrorists to win. It’s that they wanted the party most identified with fighting the terrorists to lose. If success in that resulted in terrorists winning, that’s not their fault. They’re only doing God’s work. Similarly, it’s not that Obama is trying to destroy the free market system in America and wreck the economy. It’s that he feels empowered to fix things so that highly successful Wall Street-CEO-Industry types aren’t making too much money. If that mission results in capitalism being crippled, don't blame him--blame his magnificently lofty principles.

It ought to be apparent by now that when liberals demand “action,” and “change,” they don’t sweat too much about the consequences of those actions or that change.

Witness that tea party exchange with CNN Susan Roesgen, where she acts so dismayed that a citizen could scorn the tax rebate Obama was giving him for the sake of some gun-nut fantasy that his liberty was at stake. (You’d give up $400 for liberty?!) And when Obama was asked if he still planned to raise the capital gains tax even knowing it would reduce government revenues, he said yes, because it would be fair.

There's a reason fairness is the appropriate scale of morality in the schoolyard: children haven't had enough experience to deal with the heavy work of right and wrong in a grown-up world. Fairness was the criteria Solomon pretended to apply when he offered to cut that baby in half. You’ll recall the false mother was enthusiastically in favor of it. Better a dead baby than tolerate a disparity between the maternal haves and the have-nots.

Now Obama’s running a foreign policy apparently no more “nuanced” than just to do the opposite of whatever his evil predecessor did. If that results in America becoming weaker and our enemies stronger, that’s not his fault. Bin Ladin only attacked us anyway because we were “arrogant”--and now we’re not. Besides, people like us better this way.

Surveys by both Gallup and Rasmussen surveys show that bestowing Geneva Convention protections on captured Al Qaeda killers polls particularly well among women who support late-term abortions and life-long college students driving 1989 Subarus with “Mean People Suck” bumper stickers.

We can all expect a hurricane of Democratic self-righteousness now of Katrina proportions. They will try to get as much mileage as they can out of this issue, mugging for all they're worth on each other’s programs about how incomprehensible it is that America could have sunk to this low level.

Meanwhile, the next most heinous crime the Left will go after is that of a Miss USA contestant for not thinking gay marriage is such a great idea.