Tuesday, May 5, 2009

Someone's Been Waterboarding Chris Dodd With Kool-Aid

Perhaps he was playing to the crowd of lefties he was performing for. Perhaps he thought it would help his floundering poll numbers. Or, most disturbing of all, perhaps he actually believes his analogy is apropos.

In any event, Chris Dodd on Sunday defended the ridiculous notion of criminal prosecutions for those who authorized waterboarding and other enhanced interrogation techniques that were indisputably applied to very few high value terrorists under tightly-controlled circumstances and which were directly responsible for interrupting plots to murder Americans. And he did it by comparing his imagined show-trials to the Nuremberg trials his father participated in. If the elder Dodd felt any pride for what he did, his son's analogy must have made him roll over in his grave.



So on one hand we have the Democrats advocating for the outright release of terrorists into the United States so they can collect welfare. On the other hand, led by Reid, Pelosi and now Dodd, the Dems are pushing for criminal investigations and "truth commission" investigations of government attorneys from the opposing political party for performing legal research that resulted in opinions they disagree with (though no objections were raised at the time). Even the LA Times thinks it's a stretch.
Despite the growing demands to bring criminal charges against the authors of the so-called torture memos, even critics of the Bush administration see problems with seeking to prosecute lawyers such as John C. Yoo, Jay S. Bybee or Steven G. Bradbury...

"It would be a real stretch. As long as they thought they were honestly interpreting the [anti-torture] law, they are not criminal conspirators," said Stephen A. Saltzburg, a law professor at George Washington University and a former prosecutor.
And in that context, Chris Dodd has the temerity to state that writing a memo that allows trained men to pour water on the face of our enemies to save American lives is equivalent to ethnic cleansing and genocide. He has gone from an incredibly popular and widely esteemed public official to an embarassing caricature of an incompetent ultra-liberal. It is time for Chris Dodd to go.

More coverage from RedState, Victor David Hanson, The Hill, and Hot Air.

1 comment:

Libertarian Advocate said...

My view is that Dodd had gone unchallenged for so long that suddenly, now, when people are able to look behind his Ozian curtain (with the help of internet research to be sure) they are finally seeing him for the vain and superficial intellectual lightweight he really is; Dodd in turn appears stunned and outraged by the audacity of his challengers, but also so entrenched in his ways that he is blind to his own conduct and deaf to the entirely valid charges of his critics. Its been so long that he hasn't had to use his brain, that he can now only parrot the silly talking points of his party's propagandists (Rahm Emanuel and David Axelrod). Hmmm... Shades of Joseph Goebbels...