QUOTE FOR THE DAY

“The Senate has passed a bill setting standards for treatment of detainees regardless of whether they’re covered by the Geneva Convention or not. The White House is resisting.
This resistance seems to me to be a mistake. First — as Lamar Alexander noted on the Senate floor, in a passage I heard on NPR earlier this morning — it is very much the Congress’s responsibility to make decisions like this; the President might do so in the first instance, but we’ve been at war for more than four years and Congress is actually doing its job late, not jumping in to interfere. If the White House thinks that the Senate’s approach is substantively wrong, it should say so, but presenting it as simply an interference with the President’s Commander-in-Chief powers is wrong. Congress is entitled, and in fact obligated, to set standards of this sort. It’s probably also better politically for the White House, since once the legislation is in place complaints about what happened before look a bit ex post facto.” – Glenn Reynolds, today, after months of silence on the subject. It seems to me that Glenn’s long-held (and I don’t doubt sincere) position has been disproven – that we shouldn’t keep highlighting abuses and blaming the Bush administration for them because that was “screeching partisanship” and would backfire, causing more public support for torture. So John McCain, Anne Applebaum, Nat Hentoff or yours truly are “screeching partisans”? Ahem. We just didn’t believe that loyalty to the president trumped profound moral disgrace. And we believed that the American public, if told repeatedly what was going on, would support us in the end. Now that 90 senators have joined in, the notion that this was about “screeching partisanship” is even more absurd. I mean, even Rick Santorum signed on. This was simply speaking truth to power, even if it alienates your friends and makes you enemies. Anyway, glad to have Glenn’s support at last. I hope he and many others in the conservative blogosphere will do all they can to support the measure in the House and oppose the threatened White House veto.