Friday, September 29, 2006
(5:12 PM) | Adam Kotsko:
My Assessment of the "Torture's Okay" Bill
Everyone who voted in favor of the bill deserves damnation.Those Democrats who voted in favor should be expelled from the party.
The remaining Democrats should have fillibustered, even if they knew in advance that their fillibuster attempt would fail.
In the event of a failed fillibuster, they should have used physical force to keep a vote from going forward. They should not have rested until the vote was called off or they were all in jail.
Yes, I think it was that serious of a matter.
Instead, we got this wimpy hedging to avoid Republican slander. Well, guess what -- the thing about slander is that it's not based in facts, so no matter what you do, the Republicans can still slander you. Have we learned nothing from the Swift Boat incident? Republican rhetoric officially has no basis in reality whatsoever, so taking it into account when planning political strategy is sheer insanity.
If the Democrats want to run on the slogan "liberal is the new conservative," they should at least be radically conservative when it comes to preserving civil liberties and treaty obligations -- just as they should've been radically conservative when Alito was nominated and not let the theory of the "unitary executive" (i.e., the president as Augustus Caesar) have a representative on the Supreme Court. But apparently it's too fucking much to ask that they would attempt to preserve the US Constitutional form of government. You'd hate to alienate a fucking swing voter in Ohio who thinks maybe torture is okay.
