The Democrats are shooting themselves in the foot...again, according to this column by John McIntyre at RealClear Politics.com. Here are some highlights from McIntyre's essay:
The public resents the overkill from Abu Ghraib and the hand-wringing over whether captured terrorists down in Gitmo may have been mistreated. They want Kahlid Mohamed, one of the master minds of 9/11 and a top bin Laden lieutanent, to be water-boarded if our agents on the ground think that is what necessary to get the intel we need. They want the CIA to be aggressively rounding up potential terrorists worldwide and keeping them in "black sites" in Romania or Poland or wherever, because the public would rather have suspected terrorists locked away in secret prisons in Bulgaria than plotting to kill Americans in Florida or California or New York.
The public also has the wisdom to understand that when you are at war mistakes will be made. You can't expect 100% perfection. So while individuals like Kahled Masri may have been mistakenly imprisoned, that is the cost of choosing to aggressively fight this enemy. Everyone understands that innocents were killed and imprisoned mistakenly in World War II. Had we prosecuted WWII with the same concern for the enemy's "rights" the outcome very well might have been different.
One of the major problems working against Democrats is many on their side appear to be rooting for failure in Iraq and publicly ridicule the idea that we actually might win. When this impression is put in context of the debate over eavesdropping or the Patriot Act, Democrats run the significant risk of being perceived to be more concerned with the enemy's rights than protecting ordinary Americans. This is a loser for Democrats.
If Democrats want to make this spying "outrage" a page one story they are fools walking right into a trap. Now that this story is out and the security damage is already done, let's have a full investigation into exactly who the President spied on and why. Let's also find out who leaked this highly classified information and prosecute them to the full extent of the law. If the president is found to have broken the law and spied on political opponents or average Americans who had nothing to do with terrorism, then Bush should be impeached and convicted.
But unlike Senator Levin, who claimed on Meet The Press yesterday not to know what the President's motives were when he authorized these eavesdropping measures, I have no doubt that the President's use of this extraordinary authority was solely an attempt to deter terrorist attacks on Americans and our allies. Let the facts and the truth come out, but the White House's initial response is a pretty powerful signal that they aren't afraid of where this is heading.
Bush hit a low point last summer and Fall with the PR disaster of Katrina and the Harriet Miers nomination and his relative silence about the war in Iraq. The Democrats, seeing an opportunity to capitalize, rushed in like a mob of thugs each vying to get a good kick in on the president, but in the process they reminded the country why they don't want Democrats in control of national security. In word and deed they painted themselves as the party of defeat and retreat, the Defeatocrat party, as they're now being called in the blogosphere.
The president has apparently had enough of the pummeling he's been taking, and has come off the ropes with hard combinations to the Defeatocrats' vitals. His approval ratings are beginning to climb into the high 40's as the public becomes more aware that Iraq is not at all the mess that the Dems have portrayed it, the economy is robust, and we haven't had a terrorist attack on our soil since Bush took the war to the Middle East. If the Democrats want to question Bush's integrity on the secret surveillance and hold investigations, all they'll succeed in doing is showing the public how diligently the president has been working to protect them from al Qaeda. George Bush should send a memo to Harry Reid, "Go ahead, Harry, make my day."