jim_knowlton's blog

I have two thoughts about the town hall meetings...

• Democrats keep claiming that interest groups are busing in paid instigators...where is their proof?  I haven't seen a single shred of proof anywhere that anyone is being bused into a district they don't live in.  I haven't seen a single actual individual identified as a professional rabble-rouser.  And yet, I also haven't heard any MSM conservatives call this out.  They're basically making an empty charge, with absolutely no proof to back it up, as far as I can tell.
• Concerning the fact that there are groups helping to organize indivudals to come to the town hall meetings, please.  This is what Democrats (especially unions) have done for decades.  There is absolutely, totally, 100% nothing wrong with this.  They aren't manufacturing anger...if people genuinely didn't care about the issue, all the activist groups in the world wouldn't matter.  They are simply contacting people who ARE angry, and organizing them to express their anger effectively.  And that's what democracy is all about.

So, in looking at the torture issue, I have a question...

Even if you assume everything the Democrats are claiming is true, and even if you accept as fact that all the way up to President Bush believed in and endorsed actions that constituted torture (I don't believe that, but this is just for the sake of argument):

1. Is that really worse than President Franklin Roosevelt ordering the imprisonment (or at least allowing it to happen) of thousands of Japanese-Americans, American Citizens, who had done absolutely nothing wrong, were never charged with a crime, and whose only fault was having the wrong ethnic background?
2. Is it really worse than President Truman ordering the atomic bomb to be dropped on Nagasaki, killing approximately 80,000 people, most of them civilians, and most of them from radiation poisining?  Oh yeah...our intelligence tells us the Japanese were already planning to surrender when we dropped this second bomb.

Presidents are faced with all kinds of difficult, no-win decisions.  Some are right, some are wrong.  But to criminalize good-faith attempts to protect the country seems to me to be reckless in the extreme.