I was watching a hearing of the House Government Reform Subcommittee on National Security when I saw the chairman, Christopher Shays (CT-04), say something interesting. He said that here he was lecturing the Kurds, Sunnis, and Shi’ites because they don’t seem to be able to get along, while he couldn’t get along with the ranking member of his own subcommittee. He went on to say that America, just as much as Iraq, needs to come together to solve our common problems. I thought to myself that Mr. Shays had made a profound point in an interesting way. And then I thought that it would be nice if we could get along with the GOP but that that was impossible as long as the administration is trying to legalize torture, defy the Supreme Court on the treatment of ‘enemy combatants’ and normalize and legalize warrantless domestic surveillance.
But, reading Andrew Sullivan, I got a glimmer of hope for the future. The hope can be seen in his opening statement.
By chance I bumped into Senator John Warner last night at the fifth anniversary party for the Chris Matthews Show. I was able to go up and shake him warmly by the hand and thank him from the depth of my heart for protecting this country’s honor. He replied quite simply: “It’s just the right thing for the country.”
We’ve become so polarized that I am more accustomed to hammering Sullivan, Shays, and Warner than in praising them. Today I will praise them.
Sullivan goes on:
he sight of so many Republican senators and one former secretary of state finally standing up against the brutality and dishonor of this president’s military detention policies is a sign of great hope. It turns out there is an opposition in this country – it’s called what’s left of the sane wing of the GOP. Slowly, real conservatives are speaking out loud what they have long said in private. The apparatchiks of the pro-torture blogosphere can vent, but it is hard to demonize the new opposition as “leftist” or “hysterical.” Warner? McCain? Graham? Powell? These men who have served their country are somehow less reliable on matters of war than a man who never went to the war of his own generation and has bungled the two critical wars on his own watch? Please. These men are less serious about confronting terror than Dick Cheney, whose own record of commentary in Iraq would be dismissed as unhinged and absurd if he were a lowly blogger? Please. This should have happened long, long ago – before the explosion in spending, before the conflation of religious dogma with conservative politics, before the reckless indifference toward the immensely challenging task of occupying a foreign country.
It’s time for the sane wing of the GOP to re-exert their power. John Kerry and Howard Dean tried to take our country back. They failed. We are now relying on people like Warner, Graham, McCain, and Powell to check the power grab and slip towards fascism until John Conyers and Henry Waxman can deal the deathblow to Bushism.
