Our senior US Senator, Kit Bond, is bending logic into pretzels and whacking strawmen into chaff to defend Bush’s nomination of Michael Mukasey as Attorney General.
“Judge Mukasey does not yet have the necessary security clearance to know the details of highly sensitive anti-terror programs”, noted a release from Bond’s office. “The Democrats’ insistence on asking Mukasey to comment on details he cannot know puts him in an impossible situation – doing so is like asking a judge to give a decision before he has even heard the case,” said Bond.
Yeah, and we also shouldn’t ask a nominee if a premeditated gunshot to the head constitutes murder.
Bond goes on:
“Declaring certain anti-terror techniques illegal – a prerequisite for confirmation by many Senate Democrats — could subject terror-fighters to legal actions and sanctions,” the senior Senator said in a release.
So declaring illegal techniques like torture to be, well, illegal could subject torturers to legal sanction? Oh my!
Really, this is an extension of the GOP “rules” on questioning the Supreme Court nominees. Apparently asking about the legal views of nominees whose entire job will be to offer their interpretations of the law is now verboten. Let’s see how quickly they abandon this way of thinking once a Democrat is in the White House.
dumb op-ed that Ashcroft wrote for the NYtimes and it makes me embarassed to be from Missouri.
…at about 9:30 a.m. Eastern time. The (young) aide on the other end of the line answered cheerfully. I exlained that I was calling about Senator Bond’s statement in the paper in relation to waterboarding and Michael Mukasey. I then continued with my explanation (the same one I made to Claire McCaskill’s aide in a previous call) that the United States had prosecuted people for torturing others via waterboarding. There was silence on the other end of the line. At which point I said, “Hello. Hello. Are you still there?” The individual answered that they were. I read the affidavit from the 1946 transcript describing the procedure. I gave the page citation, too. I then told the person on the other end of the line that it was disingenuous for Senator Bond and Michael Mukasey to say that they didn’t know if waterboarding was or was not torture. “We’ll pass that on the the senator.” Right. Well, somebody in his office got an ear full.