http://nypost.com/2014/12/10/tortured-logic-the-enemy/Tortured logic the enemy
By Michael Goodwin
December 10, 2014 | 4:17am
A television documentary the other night featured American soldiers who fought the Nazis in the Battle of the Bulge, the last major German offensive of World War II. The soldiers were young men when they saw friends executed and mutilated after surrendering, and candidly admitted that, in response, they showed no mercy to some German prisoners.
“We blew his brains out,” one said of a German who refused to provide information. Another said he was ordered to “waste” captives and did. Neither expressed remorse.
Quick, somebody tell Sen. Dianne Feinstein so she can retroactively condemn another group of heroes. Maybe they should be charged with war crimes. After all, it’s never too late for moralistic grandstanding in the comfort of Congress.
The documentary, “D-Day to Victory,” was on the aptly-named American Heroes Channel, and the black-and-white combat footage drives home the point that war is, indeed, hell. Yet it does so in a way that underscores the larger truth: Once war begins, winning is everything.
That necessary reality escapes Feinstein, President Obama and other arm-chair generals who mistake their squishy stomachs for virtue. The Democrats’ hit job on the CIA is ostensibly about the agency’s use of torture against terrorist captives.
Only the truth is tortured.
A friend makes an observation: “Looking at the pictures of the City Council ‘die-in,’ I realized Mayor Putz and his pals have managed to turn New York into Berkeley.”
His zinger captures the nauseating mix of leftist whining and arrogant entitlement that marks both the left coast and Gotham under Mayor de Blasio.
From the crybaby law students at Columbia who demanded and got a pass to delay final exams because of stress, to the council clowns auditioning for a spot on “Saturday Night Live,” privileged New Yorkers are rushing to get in on the victim act. Apparently acting like a jerk is the new way to show outrage.
The boorish quality of the performance offers a lesson on why American voters have turned against liberalism. It is extreme, holier-than-thou self-indulgence wrapped in a fig leaf of moral superiority. Facts don’t get in the way.
Take the inadvertent confession of a 28-year-old man who believes his anger at the police gives him the right to stop traffic and harass Christmas shoppers. His name, he told The Wall Street Journal, is Victor Borja, and he works for something called Eleven24 Coalition for Humanitarian Justice.
He declared: “We’re saying, ‘Listen to us — here we are.’ So if they’re not going to walk with us, then they’ll feel what it’s like to be treated unfairly.”
There you have it — the new Masters of the Universe. At least the Wall Street fat cats didn’t leave a mess and make you late.
It’s a Die-in shame!
Start with the fact that Feinstein is one of those fair-weather Dems who voted for the Iraq war in 2002, then ran for cover when it didn’t go well. She joins Hillary Clinton, Joe Biden and John Kerry, a lineup of opportunists that would make a whorehouse blush.
But Feinstein one-upped them all with a personal vendetta against the CIA, and spent $40 million of taxpayer money on a probe about interrogation. She gave the conclusion before the probe began — the agency lied, etc. — and released the report yesterday despite warnings it could lead to reprisal attacks against Americans across the globe.
“The CIA’s actions are a stain on our values and our history,” she insisted. She claimed the interrogations were “far more brutal” than publicly acknowledged, citing cases of sleep deprivation. And there were more prisoners involved — 119 instead of “less than 100,” she said.
She also claims, contrary to the assertions of virtually every CIA director and Pentagon chief, that none of the interrogations produced valuable intelligence. ”Not a single case holds up,” Feinstein said.
That’s it — a warmed-over pile of leftist hysteria and so-what claims that she made public before her time as Intelligence chairman expires. She was in such a hurry that her gumshoes never interviewed the people involved, meaning it is one-sided to the extreme. As such, she is preaching principle to the CIA while practicing hypocrisy.
Against her weak case stands the towering fact of 9/11 and the unconventional nature of the war on terror.
Feinstein acknowledged that unique day of horror, though she misstated the year as 2011, but only to defend herself. Lost in the fog of her thinking is that the men and women of the CIA who were sent abroad after nearly 3,000 Americans died were not on some lark. They were volunteers defending their country because Osama bin Laden declared war.
They risked their lives under the authority of the president and Congress. They acted under the supervision of CIA leaders, and congressional leaders, including Feinstein, were privy to the interrogation program, according to numerous former White House and agency officials.
If Feinstein really opposed the program, including waterboarding, she should have had the courage to speak in time to stop it. Instead, she waited for the political winds to blow safely in her direction.
At heart, her claims are not a dispute about what the agents did, or what Congress knew. That was investigated and litigated for a decade.
The essence is whether America has the stomach to win the war against Islamic terrorism. Feinstein and her ilk clearly don’t.
They want to fight war in a way it has never been fought. Of course there are limits and rules, but endless second-guessing of those who risk their lives is a formula for a war without victory.
Another word for that is defeat, and that’s where America is headed.
Inconvenient questions for the cop-haters
Reader Linda Oman puts a spotlight on an ignored aspect of the Eric Garner case.
“I don’t know why the focus has been vilifying the police,” she writes. “Why not the EMTs that stood there like bumps on a log while the guy was dying?
“I’m an EMT. When you arrive at a scene, you immediately start treating and assessing your patient. We are trained to do this over and over. It does not matter if the assailants are the police, ISIS, their wife or the pope, or if it was the person’s own fault.
“I think they are more responsible for this man’s death than the police. They were the broken link in Eric Garner’s chain of survival. Why did they just hang around and not get him to a hospital?”
Great questions. Unfortunately, they are inconvenient for the cop-haters, so they’ll go unanswered.
Sweep nothings
So Gov. Cuomo is promising an ethics package in exchange for a legislative pay raise. Wait, didn’t he sell the ethics-package promise twice already? And didn’t he hail the results both times as a cure for Albany corruption?
Let me guess: This time, he means it. Honest.
