ALL I WANT FOR CHRISTMAS IS A PRO-AMERICA SENATE
By Edward Daley (12/19/05)
So let me get this straight, last week John McCain insisted that the President agree on an amendment (1) prohibiting the torture of war detainees by the U.S. government, or the good Senator and his fellow "moderates" in the Upper House of Congress would refuse to pass the 2006 Defense Appropriations Bill to which it's attached.
Hmmm... Is it just me, or do the words "political opportunism and extortion" leap to anyone else's mind here? I mean, isn't this amendment basically just a rehashing of the "United Nations Convention Against Torture and Other Forms of Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment" (2), which the U.S. has been a party to for over two decades already? If so, what's the point of creating such an amendment, other than to announce to every Al-Qaeda member on the planet that when we capture them they will be treated with kid gloves?
Gee, that should really strike fear into the hearts of Osama Bin Laden and Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, no?
And why attach the amendment in question to legislation which is crucial to the funding of our war effort, if not to force the President into a situation where he has little choice but to accept it, or risk leaving our troops in combat with insufficient food and ammunition indefinitely? Since when does the U.S. Senate place a higher priority on assuring the humane treatment of our enemies during wartime than they do on securing victory against them?
Senator McCain and his cronies seem more interested in their own political futures than American security, or the safety of our military personnel in harm's way, and if that doesn't stir outrage within you, then whatever love you may have had for your country in the past is now dead and buried.
Oh, and let's not forget that blowhard Senators like Harry Reid and Patrick Leahy are now in the process of filibustering the extension of the USA Patriot Act (3), which they and all but one member of the Senate voted into law only a few short years ago. This legislation is responsible for preventing at least three major terrorist attacks on American soil since 9/11 (4), but now leftist nitwits in both Congress and the "mainstream" press are going out of their way to assure that it is gutted beyond recognition, in a carefully coordinated effort to return our country to the pathetic state of anti-terror readiness that Bill Clinton left us with upon leaving office in 2001.
Does anyone else out there think it's just a little nuts for these people to be attacking the very legislation they once wholeheartedly endorsed, during a time in history when we need it the most? After two years of relentlessly criticizing the war abroad, liberals are finally starting to realize that most Americans want us to finish the job we started in Iraq, and that in spite of their obstructionist antics, the United States military is actually winning, so now they've decided to attack our homeland defense efforts as a last resort.
They continuously accuse the Bush Administration of abusing civil and human rights, but they fail to admit (or they're simply too ignorant to realize) that Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who is considered by the left to be one of the greatest war-time leaders this country has ever produced, was far less respectful of those rights than George W. Bush has proved to be (5). If one were to assess the record of FDR by the standards of today's liberal intelligencia, one would have no choice but to consider him a despicable war criminal. The same goes for his Vice President, Harry Truman following Roosevelt's death in 1945 (6), but pointing out such facts to a modern liberal Democrat will only get you labeled a right-wing extremist or worse.
Of course, I expect that sort of mindless behavior from members of the anti-everything left, and I'd be shocked into a coma if Senators Reid and Leahy ever did anything that wasn't utterly self-serving. But what really burns my arse is when someone who calls himself a Republican seeks to undermine the efforts of our Commander in Chief to effectively manage the war on terror, for obvious political gain. The fact that John McCain once endured years of brutality at the hands of the North Vietnamese does not excuse him from behaving as if it is the policy of the American defense establishment to commit the same kind of atrocities that our enemies inflict upon innocent people on a regular basis.
If our government has ever condoned resorting to the torture of anyone, it's because the people in charge believed that it was absolutely necessary to prevent the slaughter of innocent people. The swine who inflicted their cruelty upon John McCain did so because they were sadists, just like the barbarians we now face. Al-Qaeda and their ilk use torture as a primary weapon of intimidation and terror, not as a last resort, and they actually enjoy watching the suffering of others.
Sure, we hear liberals babbling on all the time about the incidents at Abu Ghraib, but those were the acts of a few rogue idiots, and what they did could hardly be equated to the sort of abuse John McCain experienced. By any means, they were rightly tried and punished for their actions, and no one in authority ever made excuses for their crimes.
The fact is that if we should ever decide to torture someone in the future, you can bet that we will do so for the sole purpose of stopping a bunch of lunatics from killing untold thousands of our citizens. Suffice it to say that there is absolutely no moral equivalence between terrorists and U.S. agents in this regard, and anyone who tells you otherwise is either a fool or a liar. John McCain should certainly be able to appreciate the difference between us and them, but he has apparently turned his back on reason yet again, and his irresponsible behavior has served only to embolden our enemies.
As for the Democrats in Washington D.C., never before in the history of this nation have so many truly inept, dishonorable, and disloyal men and women been allowed to hold positions of power in our government, and never before has it been more critical to our survival that such individuals not be there. Save for a handful of Congressmen and Senators on the left-hand side of the aisle, the entire Democratic Party leadership amounts to no more than a loose confederacy of habitual whiners, racists, ambulance chasers, communist myrmidons, and traitors, and God help us all if one of them is ever elected President of the United States.
(1) http://www.fcnl.org/issues/item.php?item_id=1567&issue_id=70
(2) http://www.unhchr.ch/html/menu3/b/h_cat39.htm
(3) http://frwebgate.access.gpo.gov/cgi-bin/getdoc.cgi?dbname=107_cong_public_laws&docid=f:publ056.107.pdf
(4) http://www.newsmax.com/archives/ic/2005/12/17/81913.shtml
(5) http://historymatters.gmu.edu/d/5154
(6) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atomic_bombings_of_Hiroshima_and_Nagasaki
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