The platform of the Democratic Party is built on a human rights
abuse — abortion. Yet Democrats still pose as champions of human
rights. Today Senate Democrats will saddle up on their high horses
to trample Alberto Gonzales for allegedly sanctioning human rights
abuses against terrorists and detainees. The party of abortion will
inveigh against “torture.” Democrats who rationalize the
near-infanticide of partial-birth abortion will accuse Gonzales of
rationalizing detainee mistreatment.
When Ted Kennedy and company are beating their chests in moral
indignation, perhaps a Republican on the Judiciary Committee could
ask: Does your definition of torture cover abortion procedures?
Will the protections you extend to terrorists ever be extended to
unborn children? Do your friends at Planned Parenthood observe the
Geneva Conventions?
The moral authority of Democrats who give more rights to
terrorists than unborn children is nil. But desperate to regain
“values” ground on Republicans, the Democrats will make a show of
treating Gonzales as their moral inferior. The same Democrats who
couldn’t abide John Ashcroft’s piety at the confirmation hearings
last time will appear quite pious themselves, chastising Gonzales
for a lack of moral delicacy.
If Gonzales had written a memo endorsing free abortions at Abu
Ghraib and military hospitals, the Democrats would hail him as a
sophisticated legal mind. But since he won’t extend habeas corpus
to al Qaeda, he lacks the “value system” to defend the
Constitution. Gonzales shouldn’t feel too bad: none of the framers
of the Constitution were they alive today would get confirmed by
the Democrats either. Abraham Lincoln wouldn’t get confirmed
either. After all, he suspended habeas corpus too. Thanks to judges
appointed by the Democrats, terrorists enjoy more rights than did
American spies during the Civil War.
The charge that Gonzales will damage the Constitution is
buffoonish coming from Pat Leahy. Damaging the Constitution is the
official policy of Democrats like Leahy. It falls under their
understanding of the Constitution as a “living” document, which
just means a dead document — a blank piece of paper on which they
seek to scribble every fad and trend and invented right that
appeals to them at the moment. The Americans who wrote the
Constitution would not recognize the Constitution of which Leahy
speaks. Did they write the Bill of Rights for terrorists? Did they
expect American presidents to conduct war by judicial review?
The Democrats’ idea of protecting the Constitution is to extend
its liberties to terrorists who seek to destroy the Constitution.
Between the survival of America and the imagined rights of
terrorists, Democrats will choose the latter. Which is why they
were willing to release Jose Padilla on what at best amounted to a
legal foot fault.
Suspending habeas corpus for Al Qaeda doesn’t threaten the
Constitution; it protects it. We wouldn’t have a Constitution to
defend unless American leaders possessed constitutional powers to
win wars. It makes sense to suspend habeas corpus to save the
Constitution from its enemies; it makes no sense to lose the
Constitution in a war so as to save the habeas corpus rights of Al
Qaeda.
While terrorists are killing American soldiers, the Democrats
are smearing Gonzales for not extending the Bill of Rights to
beheaders. Washington Post columnist Anne Applebaum
writes that “anyone who has ever wanted the
United States to play a role in promoting and supporting democracy
and human rights around the world” must oppose him. You would think
from some of the comments and headlines that Gonzales is a torturer
himself.
To get Gonzales to cry uncle, the Democrats are trying to pin
Abu Ghraib on his very sane judgment that the Geneva Conventions do
not apply to terrorists. As if the deranged soldiers responsible
for that debacle were carefully sifting through his legal opinions
for permission to construct human pyramids of prisoners. The
Democrats still act as if Abu Ghraib was the byproduct of a strict,
right-wing military culture when it reality it reflected the
libertine Clinton-era policies that the Democrats won’t let the
military discard — unisex policing and training, a don’t ask,
don’t care ethos, a relaxation of military discipline and
recruitment standards in the name of making the military “more like
America,” etc.
The demented hijinks at Abu Ghraib didn’t reflect the strictness
of Donald Rumsfeld or the legal judgment of Alberto Gonzales but
the looseness and sickness of a pop domestic culture the Democrats
have worked hard to smuggle into a military they regard as
reactionary. If soldiers at Abu Ghraib were more interested in the
Tailhook Convention than the Geneva Convention, that is the
libertine left’s fault, not Gonzales’s.
