Senator Bingaman:
Please, I beseech you, there are times to keep a low profile, and I respect that is your style, but this is not one of those times. Assuming that you are in fact opposed to torture, you have an obligation, in my opinion, to speak out. As Thomas Paine wrote more than 230 years ago: “The summer soldier and the sunshine patriot will, in this crisis, shrink from the service of his country; but he that stands it Now, deserves the love and thanks of man and woman. Tyranny, like hell, is not easily conquered; yet we have this consolation with us, that the harder the conflict the more glorius the triumph.”
All you have to do, in order to become a leading national figure among the Credomats over the weekend, is to get out there and say something like this: “Torture and ‘extraordinary rendition’ are contrary to everything this nation stands for, every tradition of liberty and the rule of law for which our brave fighting men and women have died over the past 230 years. This administration’s craven and reckless policy will not only endanger our servicemen and women overseas, all for the sake of ‘interrogations’ that have gotten us precisely zero useful intelligence in five years, as we have tortured mentally ill detainees whose pain-induced babblings have led us on one wild goose chase after another; it will also erode our moral fiber and damage us irreparably in the fight against totalitarianism and political extremism around the world. No one who proposes such a policy is fit to lead this land of the free, and the political party that supports such a policy, and such a leader, can rightly be called anti-American.”
There! It’s that easy. You say a bunch of true things, you defend your country’s best political traditions, you remind millions of your fellow citizens that your party opposes the other party on some core issues, and you get some face time. It’s a win-win-win-win.
The second and third paragraph above are not my own, but they represented my sentiments exactly, so I have sent them to you as mine. It’s time to speak out. You owe it to your constituents, many of whom are simply heartbroken at this turn of events.
Sincerely,
[The language in the second and third paragraphs is from Le Blog Bérubé.]