Buckling Under

by digby

In case you were wondering how the village idiot sees the politics of the torture debate:

Chris Matthews: In the politics fix tonight, this whole torture debate is likely to tell us a lot about the kind of president Barack Obama intends to be. Will he buckle to the left, the netroots, and pursue an investigation into torture having said he didn’t want to? Or will he go post-partisan and leave the past to the historians.

This is how its being framed all over the gasbags shows today. Not that I give a damn. If “buckling under to the left, the netroots” is how they need to portray having the moral backbone to be against torture and hold those who torture accountable for doing it, it’s fine by me. It’s a dirty job but somebody’s got to do it.

For some reason, nobody in Washington DC seems to realize that Obama has to be against torture if he wants a successful foreign policy. If he doesn’t denounce this, how much cooperation can he get from allies around the world? How ridiculous do we look to our enemies? Apparently they all still think Cheney’s schoolyard tough guy bullshit actually works.

They just don’t get that this isn’t about partisan politics. It’s not even just about morality and the constitution. It’s about national security. A superpower that tortures and invades other countries for no good reason is seen by the rest of the world as a rogue nation and a threat. How that makes us safer I simply do not know.