by At the Huffington Post, Nora Ephron writes that “It’s hard to be a Democrat“, saying:
It’s hard to be a Democrat, don’t you think? There’s no alternative, of course, but it’s hard. Someone asked me the other day to write something about why I was a Democrat, and I had no trouble making a list of 10 reasons. Of course, five of those reasons were the Supreme Court, and the other five were more or less historical — reasons like FDR, which is not meant to mean Franklin Delano Roosevelt exactly but some fantasy blob of Democratic values that are a distant racial memory.
But it’s hard. It’s especially hard to remember that the real enemies are the Republicans…
I imagine that it is hard being so wrong so often.
The real enemies are Republicans? Not the Islamic madmen who fly planes into buildings, drive bombs into markets full of women and children, and cut the heads off of innocent reporters and opposing military forces? Not the killers in Kosovo, Rwanda, and Darfur? Not illegal aliens, drug pushers, gang-bangers, or child rapists?
Nora says there’s no alternative. Yet isn’t doing what right and necessary always an alternative? Perhaps not for Ephron and those who, like her, mistakenly believe that the purity of their liberal ideology puts them above the meaner business of dealing with the world as it actually is.
Her post goes on to hammer Democrats who have failed to oppose the Bush administration vociferously enough to meet her precise definition of liberalism:
What a bunch of losers, hiding behind the fact that it takes 60 votes to shut down debate and 67 to override a presidential veto. So what? So pass a law and make Bush veto it. Make him veto something every single day. Drive the guy crazy. What have you got to lose? And meanwhile what have you done? You’ve voted for the surge, you’ve voted to authorize a war against Iran, and you’re about to vote in favor of an attorney general-designate who refuses to call waterboarding torture.
What Ephron fails to consider is that the Democrats who are now responsible for governing this country must weigh the consequences of their actions when casting their votes. The stances they took during the 2006 elections were unrealistic and cannot be implemented without compromising national security. Reality set in once they took their oaths of office.
The same thing is happening with the Mukasey confirmation. Mukasey is a competent individual who is more than qualified for the job he’s been nominated for. And he’s honest: The easiest thing in the world for Mukasey to say during questioning would have been to say, “I believe waterboarding is torture and therefore illegal”. But the issue is more complicated than liberals want to make it and his answer was the only reasonable one to give under the circumstances.
Her conclusion:
we are torturing people and it has to stop, and it will never stop unless the Democrats make it stop.
And forget about the Justice Department. No one will fix the Justice Department until there’s a new president.
And he or she has got to be a Democrat.
That goes without saying.
Because after all, there’s the Supreme Court.
Assuming that U.S. personnel or their proxies are in fact torturing enemy combatants (don’t get me wrong, I think we have), future acts of this kind should be restricted to cases in which there is a significant probability of imminent danger to a significant number of Americans.
But Bush is correct in insisting that the precise questioning protocol military and intelligence officers follow should not be shaped by popular debate, even when the cheerleader is the eminent author of Sleepless in Seattle.
I hope that no U.S. personnel ever waterboard anyone. But it’s worth noting that there is a very easy way for terrorists to make sure that never happens to them: stop blowing up skyscrapers, airplanes, oil pipelines, market places, busses, trains, and police stations.
Switching gears to address Nora’s repetitive insistence that Democrats must control the Supreme Court, one can only assume she’s talking in code to the pro-abortion hordes whose idea of a national crisis is the elimination of the partial birth abortion technique.
Wrong again. No wonder it’s so hard to be a Democrat.
