The Redhunter

One major concern here is what Mr. Obama's decision to release these memos says about his own political leadership. He claims that one of his goals as President is to restore more comity to our politics, especially concerning national security. He also knows he needs a CIA willing to take risks to keep the country safe. Yet Mr. Obama seems more than willing to indulge the revenge fantasies of the left, as long as its potential victims served a different President. And while he is willing to release classified documents about interrogation techniques, Mr. Obama refuses to release documents that more fully discuss their results.

Apparently civility will have to wait.

All of this also shows the pernicious influence of groups like Movon.org. If they don't want to like Bush Administration policies, fine. What's going on here though is a policy dispute dressed up as criminal acts. This is similar to calls by environmentalists for prosecution of anyone involved in contributing to "global warming," or anti-gun groups or cities suing gun manufactures because their products allegedly violate consumer safety laws.

This makes what Obama and the Democrats are doing just the opposite of what happened to President Clinton. Whether you think his perjury rose to the level of an impeachable offense or not (and it is debatable), it was not a simple policy dispute and it wasn't the popular thing for the Republicans to do (the media at the time warning darkly that they would pay in the next election).

History

If you want to get down to it, it's no different than what any other president has done in times of war. They all do things that are later said to be 'going too far'

President Lincoln suspended habeus corpus three times during the Civil War. Here's one

Lincoln suspended habeas corpus in the confederate border state of Maryland (also a slave state) due to the fear that Maryland might secede from the Union. If secession occurred, it would result in Washington DC being completely surrounded by Confederate states.

His action was challenged in the U.S. Circuit Court in Maryland and overturned, but Lincoln ignored the court's ruling. In 1866 (5 years later), the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that it was unconstitutional to suspend habeas corpus since the President did not have that power.

Well that sounds pretty serious. Shall we demolish the Lincoln Memorial?

Now revered by almost all Americans, at the time Lincoln was lambasted by critics for what the liberals today call "shredding the Constitution. "

During World War I, Woodrow Wilson's Postmaster General was given the authority to refuse to deliver any publication he deemed seditious, and there was no appeal to his decision. At least seventy-five periodicals were effectively banned when the post office refused to deliver them.

FDR is worshiped by liberals and yet he "interned" some 110,000 Americans of Japanese descent during World War II.

My message here again is that during time of national emergency American leaders all do what seems right at the time. We have never prosecuted any of them. We must not start now.

So these "truth commissions," investigatations, or whatever the Democrats want to call them represent childishness and naivete on an unparalleled level. The only people who will be impressed are the ones who don't really matter; the Europeans, who have refused to help us in Afghanistan and are in the process of surrendering their nations to Islam.

Our enemies, on the other hand, are laughing at us.

They also know that Obama has done nothing, and I mean nothing, to actually fight terrorism, let alone jihadism. This despite that for the past several years the mantra from the left was "Bush has done nothing to make us safer" or "We aren't any safer now than on Sept 10."

Perhaps it's time for Mark Steyn to update the pronouns in what he said a few years ago:

I think when we listen to terrorists talking about the new caliphate, and there are a bunch of guys sitting in the cave, we think they're nuts. When a guy is sitting in the cave listening to (editor of The New York Times) Bill Keller explain proudly why he betrayed America's national security interests, that guy in the cave would rightly conclude that we're the ones that are nuts.

They must think we're nuts right about now.