Angry Dems deserve our anger

Jonah Goldberg:

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Frankly, I don’t get it. Democratic leaders in Congress think it’s outrageous they were never told about a program that was never put into effect. The only potential scandal I can see is that the program was never put into effect — and that we’re telling the whole world about it.

Call me crazy, but I just assumed that the CIA was out there trying to kill as many senior members of al-Qaeda as it could. Congress, in the spirit of broad patriotic bipartisan righteousness, authorized the use of force on al-Qaeda after it killed 3,000 Americans on Sept. 11, 2001. Now we find out that the CIA lacked the competence or will to hunt down and kill men desperately in need of killing.

It’s as if, years after Pearl Harbor, it was reported that the OSS had never tried to kill senior Japanese or German officials.

Yet the Democratic Congress is furious that it wasn’t fully briefed on an operation that was never operationalized.

And it’s worse than that. Nancy Pelosi, Dianne Feinstein, and others make it sound like some rogue conspiracy was afoot. “We were kept in the dark,” complained Feinstein. “That’s something that should never, ever happen again. Withholding such information from Congress “is a big problem because the law is very clear.”

But in the fall of 2001, Bush issued an executive finding authorizing covert counterterrorism measures. Congress was briefed on that. Even a cursory reading of the public record at the time shows that Congress was nothing but supportive of the effort to take the fight to the enemy.

All Cheney is being accused of is possibly telling the CIA not to brief Congress on its methods until it actually had something concrete to report. Even that appears to be an exaggeration, since Michael Hayden, head of the CIA from 2006 through 2008, has insisted he was never told to keep this plan secret from Congress.

And, again, the main scandal is that the CIA couldn’t ever get its act together enough to have anything concrete to report.

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Now Democrats are clamoring yet again for an investigation into Bush-era policies at precisely the moment their agenda is starting to unravel. The stimulus is looking more like a dud every day, Obama’s health-care and cap-and-trade schemes are acquiring an increasingly bad odor politically, and suddenly Democrats, Panetta included, are looking to offer up a big, distracting spectacle by turning the CIA into a partisan cudgel.

Again: Where’s the outrage?

I think the outrage may be hidden by the fact that people cannot stop laughing at Democrats who are outraged about a program to kill the enemy. This is self parody at the highest level.

We have always suspected that Democrats were really not serious about taking the fight to the enemy and now they seem to act like doing so is breaking some law. The Republican campaign ads will write themselves the more the Democrats talk about this "scandal."