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As best as I understand Ross Douthat’s maiden column for the New York Times, he’s contending that it would be preferable for the GOP nominee in 2008 to have run on an unambiguously pro-torture platform, rather than to see Dick Cheney litigate the case for torture in piecemeal and indirect fashion after the election. (A comeback for Mitt "Double Guantanamo" Romney?) But why believe that the country hasn’t rendered a verdict on torture just because John McCain was himself an opponent? (And not the most thorough opponent, either) First, the man the country elected by quite a large margin ran on an anti-torture platform — "The secret authorization of brutal interrogations is an outrageous betrayal of our core values, and a grave danger to our security," he said in October 2007 — and one of his first acts in office was to roll back the Bush administration’s "enhanced interrogation" apparatus.
Now, you can say that Obama hasn’t gone far enough. From my perspective, the early indications are positive, but we won’t really be able to say until we see the outcome of the current reviews of interrogations and detentions policy. (What about Bagram? How far does due process reach? What about renditions? How long can CIA actually hold people before relinquishing custody to another government or federal agency? and so forth.) Indeed, if Ross wanted 2008 to be the purest possible debate between pro and anti-torture politicians, then why not stipulate that Sen. Russ Feingold (D-Wisc.) should have been the Democratic nominee?
Then there’s the fact that there are all these laws and treaty obligations of the United States that were never considered unclear or controversial before the Bush administration revised them in secret after 9/11. Not one legislator on the Republican side has risen to introduce an Enhanced Interrogation Act of 2009 or whatever, probably because he or she knows that advocating such a position would condemn the U.S. to become an international pariah. Taken together, it would appear that those who argue for torture and who apologize for it are on the margins of a settled question, and lacking the courage of their convictions.
Crossposted to The Streak.
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The most damning part of the whole column is the underlying belief that enforcing the law is a fully political decision. When exactly did it become acceptable to openly announce that the rule of law is more a guideline than a rule?
I think Douthat’s point is less about the country as a whole than about the GOP. He realizes that the GOP in it’s current state cannot win. The wingnuts who are left in the party are completely unpalatable to 65 percent of the country and will never be able to lead the GOP to a majority. The GOP base just doesn’t realize this. Douthat’s point is that if Cheney, the conservative’s conservative, had run and loss then maybe the wingnuts who make up the GOP base would realize they have to evolve if they ever want to win again. Until then they can just say “we nominated McCain and look what happened. We need a real conservative, not a squishy moderate.”