Ogged asks: “Isn’t the Say Goodbye to America bill about as unconstitutional as can be? I understand that there are ‘no judicial review’ provisions, but might not those provisions themselves be unconstitutional? Surely some clever lawyer could cook up enough standing to challenge the bill in court?”

There will certainly be challenges, but I wouldn’t count on anything. The court-stripping issue hasn’t been litigated all that much, but the idea that congress has the power to do this kind of thing has some real support from the text of the constitution. What’s more, courts are generally disinclined to interfere in national security questions. And, of course, there’s no particular reason to think that the Supreme Court’s five conservative justices disagree with America’s conservative politicians about this. You never really know what’s going to happen, but we have a political system for a reason . . . if people elect politicians who want to give the president the power to indefinitely detain and torture people on the basis of his say-so that they’re terrorists then the president is going to end up with the power to indefinitely detain and torture people on the basis of his say-so.

I was interested to see GregPStone in comments mounting the argument that assuming the Iranians are, in fact, trying to build a nuclear bomb whose purpose is to mount a suicidal unprovoked nuclear first strike constitutes “erring on the side of caution.”

There’s something to be said for caution, but that’s not what this is at all. Rather, it’s erring on the side of panic an approach that, stealing from Atrios, we might term the Depends Theory of International Relations. Running around constantly freaking out about everything, panicking, and fostering an atmosphere of paranoid alarmism isn’t cautious at all. It doesn’t make you safer. Primarily, it prevents you from focusing and setting priorities. It blinds you to real threats by diffusing resources and effort. It leads to mistakes, and imposes enormous costs. It makes it too easy for adversaries to throw you off your game at very little cost to themselves, while making it hard for friends and potential friends to trust you. It destroys your own credibility leaving you, eventually, alone in the corner covered in your own piss.

Real strength requires the United States to act like its strong, to act with some confidence in our basic capabilities, values, institutions, etc. To be able to use that confidence to calm down, set priorities, focus energies and efforts, and make sure we’re not running around wrecking what is, objectively speaking, a very favorable situation by global or historical standards.

Tony Blair says, “This terrorism isn’t our fault. We didn’t cause it. It’s not the consequence of foreign policy. It’s an attack on our way of life.” It’s disappointing to see Blair, who I really used to respect a lot, just peddling the same old demagoguery you might see on NRO or wherever else. It goes to show, I think, that there are only so many plays in the political playbook. Initiators of unpopular, doomed wars either need to fall on their swords or else start running the obfuscation end-around and you don’t get to become Prime Minister without having the sort of instincts that make you disinclined to fall on your sword.

This notion that in order to preserve the terrorists moral culpability for their atrocities we need to believe that their actions are somehow uncaused is daft. I’ll read now and again Rich Lowry or someone else talking about how, yes, we’re in a kind of global counterinsurgency situation but then you see the leaders they love so dear don’t understand the first thing about it. Their pundits don’t, either. David Brooks accuses his adversaries of falling prey to a Grand Delusion “that if we just leave the extremists alone, they will leave us alone.” But that is not what I meant, at all. That is not it. At all. To be sure, there are some implacable opponents out there who we’ll have to do our best to kill. But there are also lots of other people out there — placable opponents, young kids with unformed views, fence-sitters, whatever — and our actions do, indeed, play a role in whether or not they become implacable opponents. This matters. It probably matters more than anything else. And the domination of western politics by people who don’t understand that is going, one day, to get an awful lot of Americans killed.

Lorelei Kelley highlights the best statements of Democrats who’ve taken the right stand in the House of Representatives’ obscene torture debate. Notwithstanding their efforts, the administration’s pro-torture position prevailed by a depressingly-not-small margin of 253-168. Those Democrats running so scared of GOP attack ads that they’re willing to toss the constitution, basic morality, and common sense about effective interrogations overboard in a futile effort to convince the Republicans not to call them soft on terrorism sure do look “tough,” don’t they?