If Mukasey still can't bring himself to declare waterboarding torture, he needs to be rejected....

I understand the box Mukasey finds himself in.

If he says it is torture, it will provide the basis for future prosecution of Rumsfeld and other officials for torture.

If he refuses to say waterboarding is not torture, he will be making a false statement that everyone knows to be false.

If he mumbles about not knowing enough to make the decision, it clear paints him as wilfully ignorant or incompetent.

I don't see Mukasey being confirmed, and we will continue to be stuck with an even worse choice acting as interim.

The time for Mukasey to come down on the side of truth and right has passed. He needs to be rejected if we are to hold onto even a semblance of constitutional foundations and adherence to the rule of law.

New Yorkers sticking together on this for some reason. I don't pretend to understand it. This is "normal Senate stuff" but I don't have to like it.

On principle, I completely agree with you. Reality is just that sad.

If Chuck doesn't vote against him, it makes him a total hypocrite, and the same goes for Senator Leahy and any of the others.

There are some issues that trump regional loyalty.

If a popular Democrat stood for the AG position and refused to say waterboarding was torture, I would vote no on them also.

bush/cheney et al.

I reckon mukasey is cussing bush about now, just like every sane American on the planet.

Standing foursquare against torture should be non-negotiable.

and being as cynical as I am about this administration, I think I found the strategy behind their little moment of doubt. These two were put out there as the voice of conscience. Then, if Mukasey comes back and makes some token gesture of moving to condemn torture, while not actually doing it, the two will act satisfied, and the dems holding up the nomination can be declared obstructionist. I mean, McCain and Graham are satisfied, they had the same concerns, why can't you be? McCain has done this before.

You know he got explicit instructions on how to answer these questions, and Addington's fingerprints are all over this one.

So do we want another yes-man to carry out Addington's nefarious and skewed view of constitutional law?

I don't think so.

think about his answer

He is unacceptable.

any democrat who votes for him, votes for torture. period

Maybe Schumer also.

I'm a lifelong Democrat but this one could be a deal breaker for me.

Please someone tell me why it shouldn't be?

Don

Because we have to keep our powder dry above all else.

and ooh, ooh, maybe even a strongly worded letter. And then the eventual cave. When it's comes to a showdown, when have the dems ever not caved? SCHIP? Maybe, but even that's not over.

...which day-job blog post can be read in its entirety here, ahem...

http://www.johnkerry.com/2007/11/1/just-say-no-mukasey



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This past September George W. Bush, the President of the United States — a position that, prior to his ascendancy at least, was generally seen as also being the nominal leader of the free world — nominated Michael Mukasey to replace his deposed crony Alberto Gonzales as U.S. Attorney General.

Mr. Gonzales, as you may recall, resigned his office under a dark cloud of accusations that included mendacity, arrogance, incompetence, and consistently putting partisan politics before public policy.

More to the point, in hearings before Congress Mr. Gonzales displayed a stubborn insistence on protecting the expansion of arbitrary presidential authority without accountability, and he repeatedly refused to condemn the use of extreme interrogation techniques like waterboarding as illegal and immoral actions that violate our best values and traditions.

And now this morning George W. Bush, the ultimate Roadblock Republican, the Obstructionist-in-Chief, petulantly accused Democrats of emboldening the terrorists and putting America’s security on the chopping block should they fail to confirm Mr. Mukasey’s nomination, thus leaving us without an Attorney General at a time when we are perched on the brink of a nuclear World War III in the Middle East. And so forth.

Mr. Mukasey, as you may recall, in hearings before Congress has displayed a stubborn insistence on protecting the expansion of arbitrary presidential authority without accountability, and he has repeatedly refused to condemn the use of extreme interrogation techniques like waterboarding as illegal and immoral actions that violate best values and traditions.

If this was the plot of a Tom Clancy novel, it might be fascinating to read but nobody would think it could ever happen in America. Unfortunately, this isn’t fiction. It’s real life, coming to you courtesy of the single most mendacious, arrogant, and imperialistic administration in our nation’s history.

Not surprisingly, Senator Kerry has no intention of allowing Mr. Mukasey to be confirmed as U.S. Attorney General:



Also not surprisingly, seeing that their choice for another complicit AG is in danger of being turned down, the Roadblock Republicans have turned to their minions in the media and their spokesbots in the conservative blogosphere for a full-court press in defense of Mr. Mukasey’s nomination. Their standard combination of obstructionism and obfuscation has managed to muddy the waters for many of their viewers/readers, leading liberal blogger and longtime Democratic activist Casey Morris to boil it back down to a more concise clarity in this post from the Democracy Cell Project website:




We agree with Casey Morris that allowing Mr. Mukasey to become the next U.S. Attorney General would be just all kinds of wrong — and so do Senator Kerry, Senator Kennedy, Senator Biden, Senator Durbin, Senator Whitehouse, and an ever-growing list of other Senators and Representatives who believe that it’s high time to rein in the Bush administration’s rampant excesses and kick the Roadblock Republicans back to the curb where they belong.



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