Cavalcade of Hypocrisy

Here’s an interesting train wreck from the Culture of Death:

Senate Republicans are now privately threatening to derail the confirmation of key Obama administration nominees for top legal positions by linking the votes to suppressing critical torture memos from the Bush era. A reliable Justice Department source advises me that Senate Republicans are planning to “go nuclear” over the nominations of Dawn Johnsen as chief of the Office of Legal Counsel in the Department of Justice and Yale Law School Dean Harold Koh as State Department legal counsel if the torture documents are made public. The source says these threats are the principal reason for the Obama administration’s abrupt pullback last week from a commitment to release some of the documents. A Republican Senate source confirms the strategy. It now appears that Republicans are seeking an Obama commitment to safeguard the Bush administration’s darkest secrets in exchange for letting these nominations go forward.

One of the main positive features of Obama’s fledgling presidency was his opposition to Bush torture policies, which I applaud. However, he is not such a slave to conscience that he is not ready to jettison that photogenic concern about Bush’s ugly and immoral policies if his own fealty to the culture of death is on the line.

Case in point: Dawn Johnsen, whom Obama wants to head up the Office of Legal Counsel. She is, like all his appointments, an abortion zealot, having served as legal director to the National Abortion and Reproductive Rights Action League (NARAL) twenty years ago. Obama really wants her bad. She was also a harsh critic of the Bush torture policies and the legal reasoning behind them. She is “the woman who could nail Bush”.

And here’s where the plot thickens and the hypocrisy gets disgustingly byzantine. The GOP senators have lined up to block her confirmation. Why? Well, they will tell prolifers it’s because of their deep, deep concern for the unborn that they phone in every January 22 and pretend to care about every election year. But the real reason appears to be that they want Obama to suppress evidence of torture and war crimes committed while they were, you know, in charge. Response: Obama immediately pulls back on his photogenic “committment” to the question of restoring integrity when it comes to war crimes–out of his dogmatic (and very real) committment to abortion as the sole core value of his party. Hey! Prosecution for war crimes is negotiable as long as I can have my pro-choice zealot in place!

I wonder: if he accedes to the GOP demands on the matter of suppressing the torture information and foregoing prosecution, will our “pro-life” GOP senators go ahead and confirm his zealous pro-abortion appointees? My bet is “yes.”

Utterly, utterly disgusting. The lot of them.