What Is It Like To Be a Democrat?

There's wonderful article on the spinelessness of the Democratic Party over at The Huffington Post. David Bromwich sets out just what the appointment of Mukasey - a man who finds it impossible to say that waterboarding is torture - as the US Attorney General means, and shows how even Republicans who should have known better fell on their swords to appease Bush.

Nobody can know better than John McCain the humiliation of the victim and the degradation of the victor that come with the infliction of torture. When the president asked Judge Mukasey to refuse to condemn the drowning torture, McCain knew that the president had made the United States as dirty in the eyes of the world as his North Vietnamese captors were dirty in the eyes of John McCain.

And McCain did speak the truth about the torture; but then, with his party, he threw himself on the "hope" that the nominee would change his mind when once in office. Thus McCain abetted his party's drive to place in charge of the laws a man who--by his sworn testimony--will be compelled to prevent the prosecution of the torturers of an Arab John McCain.

But, he asks, where were the future Democrat leaders whilst Mukasey was being confirmed?

Obama, Clinton, Biden and Dodd had declared their opposition to Mukasey earlier in the week. They could not find the time to leave their campaigns for an election a year away, to show up for a vote more critical than any they are likely to see for months. Nor did they use this occasion for a major statement. Their formulae of dissent afforded no larger view of the meaning of such acts of acquiescence by the Senate.

But where is the party that recently won the mid term elections? What difference has this change in power produced in Washington?

Given the chance to resist as a formed majority, their opposition has, in less than a year, been whittled down to ceremonial remonstrance. And the pattern is now almost ingrained. After all, this was the first president in our history to boast of assassinations: "All told, more than 3,000 suspected terrorists have been arrested in many countries," he said in his State of the Union address of 2003. "Many others have met a different fate. Let's put it this way--they are no longer a problem." President Bush, in his own words, told us that he was talking about suspects, not men convicted on evidence of a crime. The president made us all his accomplices when he remarked that the murdered men had not been given a legal process. That easy slide into the argot of hoodlums by the leader of the free world was noticed by a few at the time. But it still echoes in the minds of the Democrats, because it puts a question to them. Do they have as convincing a cry? A summons to nobility and principle that could rival the coarse efficiency of the snarl of vengeance?

The Democrats have found no alternative language to counter Bush's thuggery, and many of them - cowed by the fear of being accused of being "soft on terrorism" - simply roll over and die every time they are asked to oppose him.

People like Dianne Fienstein who issued this extraordinary statement supporting the nomination of Mukasey:

Judge Mukasey’s answers to hundreds of questions, both in our confirmation hearing and in writing, were crisp and succinct, and demonstrated a strong, informed, and independent mind.

There are many ways to describe what was revealed during Mukasey's testimony, but an "independent mind" was hardly a fitting description of a man who, by his own words, admitted that he could not call waterboarding torture in case it put CIA agents at risk of prosecution. That extraordinary admission was made by a man being interviewed for the role of US Attorney General, the highest law officer in the land.

But Fienstein is only the most consistent face of an opposition party that doesn't appear to know when it is important to oppose. And an opposition party that fails to oppose - on a matter as relevant to what values represent the US as a nation as torture does - is deserving of people's contempt.

Click title for Bromwich's article.

Tags: Democrats, Mukasey, Fienstein, backbone