Glenn repeats his citation of this passage from a NYT story:
The opposition to Mr. Brennan had been largely confined to liberal blogs, and there was not an expectation he would face a particularly difficult confirmation process. Still, the episode shows that the C.I.A.'s secret detention program remains a particularly incendiary issue for the Democratic base, making it difficult for Mr. Obama to select someone for a top intelligence post who has played any role in the agency's campaign against Al Qaeda since the Sept. 11 attacks.
then invokes critiques of this passage by Billmon and Digby, continuing:
to object to someone like Brennan -- who advocated and defended the Bush administration's rendition and "enhanced interrogation tactics" -- is hardly the same as objecting to anyone who "played any role in the agency's campaign against Al Qaeda." And Andrew Sullivan made a related point about an AP article by Pamela Hess which contains this wretched sentence: "Obama's advisers had grown increasingly concerned in recent days over Web logs that accused Brennan of condoning harsh interrogation tactics, including waterboarding, which critics call torture." As Sullivan notes: "no sane person with any knowledge of the subject disputes the fact that waterboarding is and always has been torture. So why cannot the AP tell the truth?"
Indeed. Jimmy Carter asked, "Why not the best?" Why can't Obama--and all of us--ask, "Why not the truth?" He wants bipartisanship? Fine. But why must bipartisanship require lies? And not just individual ones, but the whole Orwellian package that makes truth-telling virtually impossible? Why can't Obama simply and straightforwardly link the two together? Like this:
"We need to begin a new era of bipartisanship and truth."
