A Fair & Proliferating Question

"Easy there," hell.  Peter King (R-NY) isn't wondering what any of us in the Republican Underground haven't pondered for the past two and a half years:

“You’re talking about threatening to kill a guy, threatening to attack his family, threatening to use an electric drill on him – but never doing it,” King said. “You have that on the one hand – and on the other you have the [interrogator's] attempt to prevent thousands of Americans from being killed.”

“When Holder was talking about being ’shocked’ [before the report's release], I thought they were going to have cutting guys’ fingers off or something – or that they actually used the power drill,” he said.

Pressed on whether interrogators had actually broken the law, King said he didn’t think the Geneva Convention “applies to terrorists,” and that the line between permitted and outlawed interrogation policies in the Bush years was “a distinction without a difference.”

“Why is it OK to waterboard someone, which causes physical pain, but not threaten someone and not cause pain?” he asked, warning of a “chilling” effect on future CIA behavior…

“They’ve declared war on the CIA. We should resist and fight back as hard as we can,” he said. “It should be a scorched earth policy…. This isn’t just another policy. This goes to the heart of our national defense. We should do whatever we have to do.”

Indeed we should.  And as the finally-released and unredacted CIA interrogation memoes prove, the "enhanced" techniques were (1) very effective and (2) not within a country mile of "torture".

We have, indeed, "forgotten...how it felt that day."  We have, indeed, forgotten that the lives of American civilians are more important than the comfort of mass-murdering theofascists.  We have, indeed, forgotten that the Geneva Convention does not, as Representative King says, apply to terrorists.  And we have, indeed, forgotten that all the nice, squeaky-clean, high-fallutin' idealism in the world is worthless if it disarms the very means of its preservation from the demonic berserkers who would eradicate it.  Or, in plain, non-Vulcan English, by fighting fire with something simulating fire, we do NOT "become them"; it is, rather, the only way to beat them

And that leads to the inevitable question: By unilaterally giving up the fight in this war against a still existant and existential threat, does that not more than implicitly indicate that the American Left and its pinko Maximum Leader do not believe that the United States is worthy of being defended?  Whose side, in point of fact, are they on?

Ramesh Ponnuru really asks the same fundamental question, only much more subtley:

[S]ince career prosecutors have already reviewed the cases under discussion and declined to pursue charges, how does it serve the rule of law for Attorney General Eric Holder to re-open the question?

A rhetorical query that points right back to King's with-the-bark-on version.  And the answer is....

....their own side.  Both as a distraction from BarryCare's disintegration (to the degree that one PR inferno can distract from another rather than compounding both) and as yet another manifestation of their core attitude that only considers the utopianized Obamerika they intend to impose worthy of preservation.  Until then, any successor "man-made disasters" to 9/11 are just bonus "cris[e]s that you never want to go to waste".