Gingrich Waffles on Waterboarding.

Suddenly, Obama recognising torture and talking about possible prosecutions is to watch him "crumble under pressure from his left."

That's not what Gingrich used to say about torture:

As I said in China this spring, there is no place for abuse in what must be considered the family of man. There is no place for torture and arbitrary detention. There is no place for forced confessions. There is no place for intolerance of dissent. While we walked through the Rotunda. I explained to President Jiang how the roots of American rule of law go back more than 700 years, to the signing of the Magna Carta. The foundation of American values, therefore, is not a passing priority or a temporary trend.

But, of course, in those days Gingrich was a follower of Ronald Reagan, the man who ratified the UN Convention on Torture into American law.

Reagan said this:

"The United States participated actively and effectively in the negotiation of the Convention . It marks a significant step in the development during this century of international measures against torture and other inhuman treatment or punishment. Ratification of the Convention by the United States will clearly express United States opposition to torture, an abhorrent practice unfortunately still prevalent in the world today.

The core provisions of the Convention establish a regime for international cooperation in the criminal prosecution of torturers relying on so-called 'universal jurisdiction.' Each State Party is required either to prosecute torturers who are found in its territory or to extradite them to other countries for prosecution."

The change in Gingrich's stand is indicative of the change in the entire Republican party's stand on this issue. It is no longer even the party of Reagan. It is something much darker and much more malignant.

How else does one describe people who publicly defend - or in Gingrich's case, feign confusion - regarding such monstrous acts? Gingrich knows fine well that waterboarding is torture, he just can't bring himself to say it. But nor can he bring himself to deny it. So we end up in this pathetic halfway house. Where the only thing he can be sure of is that Obama "crumbled" in front of his leftist base.

Tags: Newt Gingrich, waterboarding, torture, Reagan