-By Thomas E. Brewton
Democrat/Socialists started the ideological warfare in Congress with their slanderous attacks that blocked the 1987 Supreme Court nomination of Judge Robert Bork. Now they are upping the ante by considering criminal prosecutions against Bush administration officials for legal and policy opinions about interrogating captured Islamic terrorists.
The Wall Street Journal reports (Obama Open to Probe of Bush Officials Who Devised Interrogations, April 21, 2009):
President Barack Obama left open the possibility of legally pursuing the Bush administration officials who formulated the policies that led to “enhanced interrogation techniques” — which critics have called torture.
In the 1987 Senate nomination proceedings for Judge Robert Bork, liberal-progressive-socialist interest groups mounted an unprecedented propaganda campaign to block Judge Bork’s nomination. Senator Ted Kennedy led the lynching party in Senatorial hearings.
No one could challenge Judge Bork’s qualifications for elevation to the Court. He had served with distinction as a Yale law professor, as United States Solicitor General, and as a judge on the Federal Circuit Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia.
Opposition came down to a single issue: Judge Bork was on record, in common with a very large percentage of the nation’s constitutional law scholars, that the Supreme Court’s Roe v. Wade ruling was based on very shaky legal and Constitutional grounds. The Court “discovered” a hitherto unsuspected Constitutional right to unfettered abortion obscured within the penumbras of the shadows of the Constitution. Translation: a majority of the Justices, on sociological, not legal grounds, believed that there ought to be an abortion right, so they artificially implanted one in the Constitution, completely disregarding the Ninth and Tenth Amendments, which historically had reserved regulation of such matters to the states and to local jurisdictions. Even liberal-progressive Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, a former feminist rights attorney, wrote that the nation would have been better served had the Court left the abortion issue to state legislatures.
President Obama’s possible criminal prosecution of Bush administration officials is of the same material. Radical liberal-progressive-socialist voters and members of Congress want to criminalize honest, best efforts of the Bush administration to protect the American people from terrorist attacks such as those that destroyed the World Trade Towers on September 11, 2001. They believe that, in a socialized world of “hope” and “change,” there ought to be no need for rough interrogations to elicit intelligence to prevent terrorist attacks.
Ideologically, liberal-progressives support, on the home front, any measure to promote social decadence, from drug abuse to sexual promiscuity. On the international front, they fail to understand the stark reality and necessity of protecting our national interests, often with harsh measures. For them, popularity with overseas street mobs is the only currency of worth. Hence their subordination of homeland security to feel-good overseas relations, at any price.
Because liberal-progressive-socialists believe that the Constitution is subject to a sort of Darwinian evolution under the pressure of public opinion shifts, they are comfortable with judicial activism and with ex post facto criminalization of legal and policy advice from administration officials, provided that their targets are precepts or people they don’t like: Judeo-Christian morality or conservative political officials.
If the Obama administration does elect to pursue criminal prosecutions of Bush administration officials for authorizing interrogation techniques – which, at the time, were regularly reported to and approved by the same Democrat/Socialist members of Congress who now demand the heads of those who briefed them – woe betide Democrat/Socialists when the Republicans regain the presidency and control of Congress.
Our ideological civil war has deepened in intensity and bitterness since the Democrat/Socialists started it. God, if it fits His design, can end it. Or He may be using the conflict as a way to punish all of us for becoming self-centered consumers of material goods and worshippers of the political state as our presumed ultimate source of social well being.
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Thomas E. Brewton is a staff writer for the New Media Alliance, Inc. The New Media Alliance is a non-profit (501c3) national coalition of writers, journalists and grass-roots media outlets.
His weblog is THE VIEW FROM 1776 http://www.thomasbrewton.com/
Feel free to contact him with any comments or questions : EMAIL Thomas E. Brewton
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