commentary by Michael L. Bromley
copyright 2005

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... of Politics

Jan 7/05: While torture torture torture! is still in the news with the Gonzales hearings on, the news cycle has already washed on by. You can still link to "all 1,645 related" stories on it, but it's old already. The outrage served its purpose of swinging at Gonzalez to hit the President. John Kerry actually played this one right. In the most astute thing he's done since becoming the anti-Dean Democrat (the only smart thing he did all election), Kerry bailed out of DC, the Gonzales hearings, and the Electoral College vote confirmation (see yesterday's autos entry), and showed up in Baghdad to be ignored. Kerry applied Twain's theory that it is better to let people think you're a fool than to open your mouth and prove it, something his comrades in the Senate proceeded to affirm. Kerry was in Iraq to be neither seen nor heard. For a proper sounding, we have to go to the UAE's Khaleej Times to find out what went down:

Former presidential candidate Kerry visits troops in Iraqi city of Mosul
Former US presidential hopeful John Kerry visited US troops stationed in the northern Iraqi city of Mosul, scene of a major suicide attack against on a US base in December, the US military said on Friday. Kerry ate dinner on Thursday with soldiers at Camp Freedom, a former Saddam Hussein palace, and met with Brigadier General Carter Ham, commander of troops in northern Iraq, and local provincial governor Duraid Kashmula, it said in a statement. “Thanks for what youre doing,” the senator from Massachusetts told soldiers. “The folks back home really appreciate your courage and sacrifice.”

It's tempting to call all the torture mania a hypocrisy, but that's too easy. Of course it is, but that's not the point. It's a side-show and that's just how things work in politics. So be it. I'm more interested in why John Kerry demurred the issue. Nobody cares what he says or does in Iraq. We're past his game there. It's gone. The election is over. So why leave all those delicious photo-ops and sound bites to Hillary & Co.? Maybe Kerry learned his lesson after all.

It does the politico no good to be less for or less against something than the opposition. The Republicans delivered four terms to FDR by being less for government intervention in the Depression than FDR and not firmly against it. Now we have the Senate Democrats being less for fighting terrorism than the President. Try all they want, they'll never get to be both against torture of terrorists and against terrorists. Try all they want, they cannot remove the subjects of torture from the torture and its purpose (and I am being generous with the word "torture" -- see my Jan 5 entry). Following the 2001 attacks, the President made a damned good case for maltreatment of our enemies, which included, don't forget, invading two countries and killing people. Now we're supposed to fret over the treatment of a handful of our enemies that we didn't kill? The best they can do is say, "I'm not defending terrorists, I'm against this Administration's use of torture on them..." blah blah blah. That is, get information from the terrorist but don't treat them too badly, Okay? Once again, the President's opponents have put themselves into the stupid position of being for something less than the President without being against it. 

That's not to say that torture is justifiable. I'm willing to leave that judgment to the agents involved and the individual cases, especially in the early days of the War on Terror when we really didn't know what we were up against. The early days of the war Information was scarce, and the best way to it was through the ones we could catch. That's all forgotten now. Now it's about the Administration's mishandling of everything, with this week's gong ringing over Gonzales and the "torture memo."

The only way Kerry could have won the election was to be more gungho for the War on Terror than the President. His people knew this, thus the "For a stronger America" crap. Only he couldn't do that and keep the base -- or himself, thus the pathetic violation of Lincoln's maxim on the impossibility to fool all the people all the time. All we got from Kerry was that he'd do better what the President was already doing. Kerry thus pledged himself to the Bush mission -- while holding a French nose. The people wisely chose the guy who actually believed in it. The election lost, and now off to Iraq, Kerry can get back to honesty. Thank God for that. I'd rather him in Iraq bad mouthing the mission and the President, than back home with feet planted in his election year deceit. Hugs for the troops was not his purpose in Iraq. This was:

"What is sad about what's happening here now is that so much of it is a process of catching up from the enormous miscalculations and wrong judgments made in the beginning. And the job has been made enormously harder."
[from the SF Chronicle: Kerry cheered in Baghdad, decries Bush team's 'blunders' -- here for a FreeRepublic.com blogger's refutation of the headline -- no where in the article is it mentioned that Kerry was cheered.]

Not even the Chronicle could turn that into news. They went and made up a headline in order to make it interesting, somehow. Nobody cares. The noise is back in DC, where Kerry's Senate buddies -- and the '08 Democratic candidates -- are stuck playing the game that lost '04 for Kerry. Go get 'em tigers:

(just a little) Less torture for terrorists!
 

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