Over the weekend, former VP Dick Cheney once again took to the airwaves to attack President Obama and Attorney General Eric Holder for daring to appoint a special prosecutor to investigate excesses in CIA detainee interrogations—or what the rest of the English speaking world calls torture.
Whatever criticism has been leveled against the limited scope of the investigation, the fact that Dick Cheney finds its very existence so offensive is the best hope I’ve seen that Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse is correct: the investigation will follow the evidence, eventually, where it leads.
And for that, Cheney should be worried.
But what should stand out as a stark reminder for many among us who have decided to cast away from President Obama in recent weeks, is something that conservative blogger, early Obama endorser, and vehement torture opponent Andrew Sullivan noted over the weekend: The GOP is officially and unashamedly the party of torture.
Sullivan reminds us, in a vicious takedown of Fred Hiatt’s Washington Post, the neoconservative project, and now the de facto position of the paper’s editorial pages, which Cheney trumpeted on Fox News Sunday, is that torture is still a plank in the neoconservative project in the war on terror.
The fight for America to remain a torturing nation is resilient. It's what the neocons believe in: the torture of terror suspects, especially Arab or Muslim ones, even if there is no imminent threat of a WMD (and the interrogations found that al Qaeda was nowhere near a nuclear capacity).
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The fight must go on, as it must against the forces resisting every other kind of change in Washington, change that the American people insisted upon last fall. And the more vulnerable many neocons sense Obama is in the polls, the more furiously they will go about playing the Dolchstoss card, accusing the president of allying with terrorists to kill the American people. After the next attack, they will not blame al Qaeda, they will blame Obama. And they will do all they can to restore torture as the pre-eminent form of interrogation for the leader of the free world. This is the threat we face. Electing Obama was just the start of restoring the US as a nation governed by the rule and core moral decency. We are learning that more acutely with every day that passes.
And here is where the fight for health care intersects with everything that progressives have fought for since the dawn of the twentieth century. As Mike Lux wrote on the Huffington Post:
Understand that whether we like it or not, the progressive movement's fate, at least for the next few years and probably longer, is inextricably tied to Obama's.
[snip]
If Obama fails on health care (and, by the way, I consider failure to be either not passing a bill, or passing a bill that doesn't work for the middle class), we won't see another attempt at serious health care reform for at least another generation. If he fails at doing something big on climate change, we probably won't be able to get anything done on it until it is too late to make a difference. And if his economic policies fail, regardless of demographics moving in our favor or Republican extremism, all Democrats will be punished at the polls, and the far-right that has taken over the Republican Party will probably come into power. And this isn't just about the long term, either: for every percentage point Obama's approval drops, we probably lose another two or three House seats in 2010.
However, I’d go a step further than Lux, who frames much of his post on losing the progressive fight largely on domestic policy. Weakening Obama means emboldening the Party of Torture. A win for them is a vindication for the Cheney worldview and an almost guaranteed resumption of the kind of torture and preventive war policies that even Bush had come to reject in his second term.
For those of us who have fought not only for health care reform, but for a more just foreign policy, a failure on health care will mean a collapse of Obama’s political strength and thus a rapid unraveling of everything else that was bound up in his election win. That includes global warming and energy reform to a Middle East peace, emboldening our domestic and foreign political opponents alike.
And so as we resume the push in Congress to pass meaningful health care reform, let this weekend serve as another moment when the choices we face in this country came into sharp relief. And let us remember that the fight for health care is only the beginning for slowly and painfully bringing change to America.
With that, I’ll close with Mike Lux’s recommendation for how to make the case to the White House:
Progressives' strategy, then, should not be to attack Obama personally, to undermine voters' confidence in him, but to shore up the backbone of progressives in Congress -- and in his own administration, because I guarantee you, policy debates between more and less progressive staffers are held every day at the White House. If Obama makes a bad policy decision, we shouldn't hesitate to push back or encourage progressives in Congress to do the same, and if White House staffers are pursuing destructive political strategies (see the "left-of-the-left" quote), we shouldn't hesitate to bang on them. But our goal should be to do all this while still holding up hope that Obama will move in the right direction, and to praise the hell out of him when he does.
Electing Obama was just the start. Change doesn't come from Washington. Change comes to Washington.