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[font=Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif]Democrats' Fury, and Values, Go AWOL [/font]
[font=Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif]by Marie Cocco[/font]
[font=Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif]I've been thinking a lot lately about Howard Dean.
A year ago, the Democratic establishment was openly vexed at the prospect that Dean, the former Vermont governor who led an insurgent campaign for president, might win the Iowa caucuses and so be catapulted to the Democratic nomination. As it happens, Dean lost badly in Iowa and then imploded spectacularly.
I did not think highly of Dean's candidacy, nor of the legions of Deaniacs who were mostly young and inexperienced at politics and so thought they knew better than the old and experienced. But I understand what drove their fury.
And I have been thinking about Dean lately because I've been thinking about the Democratic response - rather, the stunning lack of one - to the Alberto Gonzales nomination.
Gonzales is the first-term counsel for the Bush White House who helped develop novel interpretations of the laws of war and human rights that led to the torture, abuse - even death - of scores of detainees held by the United States in the war on terror. For his part in this blot on the nation's international reputation, the president has rewarded Gonzales with promotion to attorney general.
Gonzales had generous opportunity at his confirmation hearing last week to repudiate his own reasoning - laid out in a memo that he, and not some Justice Department functionary, wrote - that the president can ignore both international law and domestic anti-torture statutes, and that anyone acting on this authority could evade responsibility for war crimes if such an "unwarranted prosecution" were pursued. Gonzales declined at the hearing to say whether he still thinks the president is empowered to order torture and immunize those who carry it out.
Likewise, he could not - would not - say whether a foreign nation could order the torture of U.S. citizens if its leaders thought their own national security was at stake. "I'm not in a position to answer that question," Gonzales said. Nor would he say whether he agrees with outgoing Attorney General John Ashcroft, whose opinion was that torture is an ineffective interrogation technique. "I don't have any way of reaching a conclusion on that," Gonzales said.
Eloquent obtuseness is a trait of in-your-face nominees. Having been sufficiently audacious to put themselves forward despite a scandal that would cause others to slink away in shame, they know that a few hours of dodging and weaving wins them a more exalted position.
No senator has come forward to oppose Gonzales. Senate Republicans coalesce around their commander-in-chief. Senate Democrats coalesce around a strategy of convenient fecklessness.
The Democrats are, of course, opposed to torture. They have, they say, "serious questions" or "grave concerns" or "deep reservations" about Gonzales' record on the subject. And they are, most all of them, planning to vote for him anyway.
Just like most of them voted to give the president authority to invade Iraq, even though they had serious questions and grave concerns and deep reservations about that, too. The Iraq war vote, more than anything, is what ignited the Dean insurgency. There was this sense - a correct one - that Democrats in Washington would not stand up to stop George W. Bush even when they sensed the president was driving us over a precipice.
Now these senators are poised to take the following position: They are against torture but they are for the man who set the stage for torture.
The Democrats lost the presidential election in part because they aren't trusted on national security. How is this problem solved by embracing one of the administration's worst foreign policy failures?
What did acquiescing on Iraq get the Democrats? Substantively, they are complicit in the misadventure and will be part of the political generation that must spend the next decade or two digging out from the rubble. And politically? The Democrats lost seats in Congress and the contest for president, too.
Enabling the Bush administration's habit of escaping accountability for even the grossest failure isn't smart politics. It's cowardice. If Democrats are to compete on the political turf of values, they'd better find some they stand for. Marie Cocco's column appears Tuesdays.
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