Here’s mud in your eye

It was always quite clear that liberals’ efforts to wreak vengeance on President George W. Bush for his (successful) terror-war strategy would hurt Democrats more than it hurt him, but who ever dreamed it would become quite so funny this fast?

Minutes after House Speaker Nancy Pelosi gave her news conference on the subject of “torture,” she, and not Bush, was the issue and story; she was at war with the CIA and Director Leon Panetta; she was at war with House Whip Steney Hoyer, who wants to succeed her; and she had become a huge problem for President Barack Obama — or as he might say, a “distraction” — who had trouble enough trying to reconcile his rhetoric with the demands of his office, and his responsibilities to protect the country with the addled demands of his frenetic admirers. Not bad for a 25-minute presser. And this was just the first day.

This knowledge that the Democratic leadership of the House and Senate had known of and approved at last tacitly the “harsh” techniques sanctioned by the Bush administration in the grim days after 9/11 was the more explosive on the heels of the news that many Bush-era tactics — detainment, rendition, Club Gitmo — were being endorsed by their president.

The problem is that like the CIA, the entire government is now in the hands of the Democrats, who now have the job of protecting the country, not under past conditions, not under conditions they like to imagine, but conditions that really exist. The conditions that exist are those in which small groups of people, undeterred by threats or the prospect of dying, are able to inflict immense harm.

Pearl Harbor was a surprise attack, but it took place thousands of miles from the mainland and was an assault on the Armed Forces. The 9/11 attacks were an assault on the mainland, on unarmed civilians who were going to work. In conditions like this, nice people from Chicago and Texas, who find themselves charged with protecting the lives of 300 million, may find themselves employing “enhanced information techniques” seldom used in the days of orthodox warfare.

This may cost them the good will of the chattering classes of the East and West coasts and most cities in Europe, but, as Scrappleface puts it, “crashing hijacked planes into buildings full of noncombatant civilians is one of several ‘enhanced immolation techniques’ forbidden under U.S. and international law.”

Trying to square their need to trash Bush for his successful deterrence agenda with their need to escape blame if harm comes if his acts are reversed by their people, liberals react with the perfect lucidity that has long been their main trait. Eugene Robinson insists that because it can’t be proved beyond doubt that any technique used by the Bush administration stopped any specific attack from occurring, it proves beyond doubt that none did.

Maureen Dowd cites Vice President Dick Cheney as the proximate cause of Pelosi’s implosion, claiming that while he did many mean things in his lifetime, “presiding over policies so saturnine that they ended up putting the liberal speaker ... on the hot seat about torture” is surely the worst. She makes it clear that HE is the one guilty if attacks occur on Obama’s watch, or at any point in the 21st century. “He left our ports unsecured, our food supplies unsafe, the Taliban rising and Osama on the loose,” she goes on in her sweet, unhinged fashion. “No matter if or when the terrorists attack ... Cheney will be deemed the primary one who made America more vulnerable.” Deemed by whom, kemo sabe? Guess that’s why we had all those attacks, and waves of food poisoning, while Bush was still president. But if Cheney cracked down on the ports and food imports, it would mean even more fascist repressive restrictions. And The New York Times could not tolerate that.

Frank Rich writes that Bush is dragging Obama into his orbit, but, knowing now he is defending the country, Obama is moving to him. Tina Brown told Joe Scarborough that the American flag had been splattered with mud in the Bush era. The “mud” will remain for the indefinite future. Or, until this new war has been won.

Examiner columnist Noemie Emery is contributing editor to The Weekly Standard and author of “Great Expectations: The Troubled Lives of Political Families.”