Dorrk Dot Com

There’s plenty of in-depth discussion of both the Obama and Cheney speeches all over the place today, so I’m just going to address a couple of aspects that I don’t think are getting enough attention.

Obama continues to hammer the canard that the out-of-favour policies of the Bush Administration (like Guantamo Bay and interrogation techniques like waterboarding) made the U.S. less safe by diminishing our moral standard in the world and radicalizing our foes.

This is problematic on several levels.

First, the very concept that our moral standards are being diminished runs exactly counter to the usual left/liberal narrative of the United States, who have been riding an almost century-long hobby horse of decrying our country’s iniquities. If you buy the typical liberal intellectual (Zinn/Chomsky) characterization of our past (with the U.S. legacy of religious witch trials, genocide of noble savages, racist slavery and miscegenation, oppression of women, exploitation of laborers, Jim Crow, vicious annihilation of Dresden and Japan, injections of syphilis and AIDS into African Americans, political assassinations in Iran and Chile, support for cruel dictators, Central American death squads, anti-gay violence, regular police and prison brutality and well-deserved blow-back on 9/11) how exactly is the mildest application of waterboarding in history and one off-shore facility for holding terrorist any worse than what came before? Surely, the slow progressive track of the U.S. over the last half-century has improved our moral standing with our recent infractions pale in comparison to the so-called crimes of our past.

So, yes, Obama is being condescending.

Second, let’s say for fun that our Guantanamo Bay prison and interrogation techniques have in some heretofore undemonstrated way made the U.S. less safe. The premise behind this claim is based solely on the way in which these things change perception of the U.S. in the eyes of our enemies or draw focus on our darkest corners.

I think, on the first part, you would need to make a very foolish assumption that our terrorist enemies previously did not mean harm to the U.S., and only after hearing of our detainee treatment did they enlist wholeheartedly in the jihad. This is not only chronologically incoherent, but suggests a baffling superciliousness on the part of our enemies.

On the second part, if focusing attention on the dark and unstomachable practices we have proscribed to combat terrorism is truly damaging not only to our reputation but our national safety, then aren’t the lefty blogs and the elected Democrats who collude with the mainstream media to endlessly focus on and call for justice for these “crimes” the real culprits? If our national safety is really seriously at stake, as they say, should they not at least be more circumspect about investigating and punishing such transgressions?

You would think.

But apparently Obama’s particular brand of post-partisan non-ideological pragmatism justifies incoherent demogoguery to score political points.

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