Andrew McCarthy’s article in today’s National Review Online characterizes the Democrats witch-hunt as a cynical farce. He strips the professed moral high ground from their argument and demonstrates how disingenuous they are. Obama, Kennedy, Leahey, et al are out for political revenge and willing to promote policies inimical to the best interest of the country.

The story begins in 2006, before Democrats took control of congress and while the memory of 911 was fading from public attention.

Sen. Ted Kennedy proposed an amendment to the Military Commissions Act MCA then under consideration. His measure would, finally, have brought clarity to the legal status of waterboarding. It would have expressly defined the procedure as a violation of Common Article 3 CA3 of the Geneva Conventions, putting it on a par with “torture” — which is specified in CA3 — and making it punishable as a war crime.

The amendment lost, 46-53. All Democrats except one Sen. Ben Nelson of Nebraska voted in favor. One Republican still in the Senate, Arlen Specter of Pennsylvania, voted with the Democrats. As a result, while the MCA substantially overhauled the war-crimes statute Section 2441 of the federal penal code, it did not criminalize waterboarding to say nothing of less harsh tactics. Nor did Congress touch the torture statutes Sections 2340 and 2340A, which define and punish torture, much less enact a clarification that waterboarding is torture. The legal status of waterboarding remained exactly what it had been: ambiguous, at best.

This history is significant because Republicans no longer run Congress, like they did back then. Since January 2007, Democrats have been in charge of both houses. At any time they wished, they could have revived the Kennedy Amendment, and passed it. Since January 2009, moreover, Democrats have run not only Congress but the White House. At any time they wished, they could have ended what they call the “false choice between our security and our values” translation: their considered choice of no security and their values. At any time they wished, they could have settled the debate and passed a law: No more waterboarding.

They haven’t done that. For all the high dudgeon, they won’t do it. And the reason for their reticence is shameful: To clarify the law would be to admit that the law has been unclear. Clarifying law is not the objective, settling political scores is.

To enact laws against coercive interrogation today would demonstrate that Democratic witch-hunts based on the coercive interrogation of yesterday — against the intelligence officers who carried it out and the legal experts who arrived at the inconvenient truth that our law did not prohibit it — are grotesque. These investigations violate the constitutional bar against ex post facto prosecutions. They run afoul of the constitutionally derived “rule of lenity,” which bars prosecutions based on vague statutes that fail to provide adequate notice of what the law forbids. And they flout the doctrine of qualified immunity, which protects government officials from liability unless their conduct transgresses, as the Supreme Court has put it, “clearly established statutory or constitutional rights.”

What is going on beneath President Obama’s theatrics about “our values” again, meaning his values is a cynical farce. If our values were really at stake, if there were a consensus among us i.e., Americans that harsh interrogation tactics could never be justified, the Democrat-controlled Congress would outlaw them today and bask in the resulting adulation. But there is no such legislation, because the goal here has nothing to do with improving American policy.

The goal is vengeance, pure and simple.

 

via A Dishonest Debate by Andrew C. McCarthy on National Review Online.

The article goes on to demonstrate the effect of the witch-hunt on public policy and the lives of those involved. What a vile web Obama starts to weave!

National Review Online’s editorial today chides Obama’s lecture to the credit card companies as “theater.” It is indeed that but with his populist campaign infinitum as the root. This is dangerous. Here we have a government that owns and regulates and preaches all with taxpayer money and in most cases against taxpayer interests. If it’s not the banks it’s the auto companies he thinks he owns and indeed controls beyond the scope of legal regulation. He blurs the bases of federalism ignoring state usury laws; he oversteps congressionally enacted regulation.  The article is quoted in part as follows:

President Obama, flitting from crisis to crisis without ever quite managing to solve one, has alighted upon credit cards. He summoned a dozen credit-card executives to Washington and dressed them down. Finding credit-card statements difficult to read, Obama proposes to put the wordsmiths of the federal government in charge of reforming them. He also proposes to manage interest rates and fees, the size of the type on bills, the content of card issuers’ websites, and the ease of comparison-shopping among competing cards. As the commercial says, there’s a card that’s right for you — and the president believes he knows which it is: “Every credit-card issuer has to issue a plain-vanilla, easy-to-understand, simplest-possible credit card that would be the default credit card that the average user can feel comfortable with.” Default may be a poor word choice in the context of credit, but the message is clear: You yahoos are going to eat your plain vanilla, and you’re going to like it.

The credit-card companies are not America’s most sympathetic businesses, it is true, and President Obama is, in his cynical fashion, exploiting that fact. Some issuers charge usurious interest and fees, some engage in sneaky billing practices and marketing shenanigans. And some don’t. We already have interest-rate controls and laws against fraud. If the president has reason to believe these laws are being broken, then the proper remedy is prosecution of the offenders. Making a political campaign out of it will only muddy the waters.

As silly as we find the spectacle of the president’s criticizing the typography on our Mastercard bills, there is a serious side to this. The government does not have an especially inspiring record when it comes to intervening in consumer credit markets. Its efforts toward expanding and cheapening credit in the real-estate market set the course for our arrival in these present economic straits. Will government management of credit cards be any more resistant to narrow political demands? A clumsy intervention in the credit-card markets could quite easily produce another wave of bank failures. The credit-card executives Obama lectured in Washington last week represented companies that are household names for bailout-watchers: Citi, JPMorgan Chase & Co., Bank of America. 

It is unsurprising that a Chicago pol specializing in socioeconomic resentment would be attracted to this subject. Affluent people with good credit get really good credit cards that sometimes buy them airline tickets, and people without much income or credit get relatively bad ones that charge them lots of fees. But for the less well-off, credit cards, used judiciously, can be an important source of short-term lending, as well as a great convenience when traveling or renting a car. If Obama clamps down on credit-card companies in a way that threatens their profitability, it is the customers at the lower end of the spectrum who will pay the price. And even among people of modest means who have high-fee, high-interest credit cards, a bank-issued Visa is still likely to be a much, much better deal than their next likely sources of credit: payday loans. 

Credit is a product, and product prices are best set by the market, not by Barack Obama. We sense that the president is here more engaged in populist theater than in serious consideration of lending practices.