OP-ED: "Democratic majority meaningless once again"

http://www.boston.com/news/globe/editorial_opinion/oped/articles/2007/11/06/democratic_majority_meaningless_once_again/">Democratic majority meaningless once again

By Derrick Z. Jackson
Globe Columnist / November 6, 2007

EVIDENCE OF a Democratic majority in Congress keeps fading away. The party rode antiwar sentiment back into leadership of the House and Senate a year ago, but we are no closer to withdrawal. And now we have the nomination of Michael Mukasey for attorney general.

In his Senate confirmation hearings, Mukasey refused to say whether he thought interrogation methods such as the simulation of drowning, known as waterboarding, should be considered torture. Showing fairly shallow knowledge for the next standard-bearer of justice, he said, "I don't know what's involved in the technique. If waterboarding is torture, torture is not constitutional."

One would think that by now the Democrats would have developed the spine to stand up to such nonsense nearly seven years into George W. Bush's presidency, which has sunk America's global moral standing with the unprovoked invasion of Iraq, the prison torture scandal of Abu Ghraib, and the many killings of innocent Iraqis by soldiers and contractors.

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The Mukasey nomination was an opportunity to tell the nation and the world that Americans are done letting this White House warp the nation's morality. That opportunity is now apparently gone. Mukasey may be no Alberto Gonzales, but he has already signaled that he will be guided not by his own moral and legal compass, but by Bush's.

With every rationalization that lets the Bush administration off the hook, the Democrats render themselves meaningless.