Scathing Attacks

Rahm Emanuel appeared with that bastion of media fairness and equanimity, George Stephanopolous on Sunday to explain the rationale for releasing those CIA memos on how we actually applied "Enhanced Interrogation Techniques." The explanation was magnificent. It was, he patiently explained, to improve America's status among the Jihadis of the world. By showing them what we do, how we do it, the limits on how far interrogators can go and promising a kinder gentler welcome should they ever be our guests, they would now love us. Here's a quote from a commentator:

Turning aside the quest for answers to knotty questions -- including several on the point that most of what we now know about al Qaeda had been gleaned precisely from these enhanced interrogations -- Mr. Emanuel indicated that the Obama administration was guided by higher concerns. He proceeded patiently, to explain. By revealing the memos, with their detailed information on those interrogation techniques (now banned), we had elevated our moral status in the eyes of the world. More important, we had improved our standing in the eyes of potential terrorists. This would undermine al Qaeda, Mr. Emanuel explained, because those interrogations of ours helped to enlist terrorists to their cause. All of which was why the publication of the memos -- news of which would presumably touch the hearts of militants around the world -- would make America safer.

There is always danger in repeating propositions like this often, among them the likelihood that their irrationality will begin to make itself clear to anyone hearing it over time.

I particularly like the final comment on the irrationality becoming manifest over time. Then there is this about the Messiah's recent trip to Europe:

He had gone to Europe not as the voice of his nation, but as a missionary with a message of atonement for its errors. Which were, as he perceived them -- arrogance, dismissiveness, Guantanamo, deficiencies in its attitudes toward the Muslim world, and the presidency of Harry Truman and his decision to drop the atomic bomb, which ended World War II.

There seems to be very little which America has done in the last century which he is not willing to grovel about. The observer then adds this explanation about where it all came from--an explanation I heartily agree with:

None of this display during Mr. Obama's recent travels could have come as a surprise to legions of his supporters, nor would many of them be daunted by their new president's preoccupation with our moral failures. Five decades of teaching in colleges and universities across the land, portraying the U.S. as a power mainly responsible for injustice and evil, whose military might was ever a danger to the world -- a nation built on the fruits of greed, rapacity and racism -- have had their effect. The products of this education find nothing strange in a president quick to focus on the theme of American moral failure. He may not share many of their views, but there is, nonetheless, much that they find familiar about him.

The remarkable part is that these opinions are not from some extreme right-wing blogger. Read the whole thing here:

Wall Street Journal Opinion