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have Tom DeLay delay an airport security bill is immoral, is wrong,
and it just doesn't make any sense," blustered Nita Lowey,
a Democratic congresswoman from New York, in yesterday's Washington
Post.
It's immoral?
DeLay opposes a Senate-approved plan that would turn the nation's
28,000 airport baggage screeners into federal employees. His opposition
may be wise or unwise — we happen to think it's wise, on the
grounds that private companies won't handle security the way the
Post Office handles the mail — but it certainly isn't immoral.
(See www.heritage.org
for an argument in favor of DeLay's position.)
Too much has
been made of "bipartisanship" since September 11. Most
of it has been phony, and any return to normalcy requires letting
Democrats be Democrats and Republicans be Republicans. Lowey's comments
would be foolish under any circumstances, attempting as they do
to make a prudential disagreement into a moral issue. In today's
context, they are clearly meant to suggest that DeLay is putting
partisan considerations above the imperative to protect Americans
from terrorists. (The Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee,
which Lowey heads, refused to clarify her remarks today.) The equivalent
slur on the other side would be to accuse Democrats of wanting to
federalize airline security not because they sincerely believe it
would help protect Americans but merely to create new constituents.
The Senate
passed the airport-security bill unanimously, but DeLay isn't as
isolated as that vote suggests. Senate Republicans, having fought
off Democrats' proposals to add handouts to airline workers to the
bill, left it to House Republicans to deal with the federalization
issue. On ABC's This Week yesterday, Senate Republican leader
Trent Lott gave DeLay some encouragement.
Born-Again Hawk
"I wish the first Bush administration had finished the job
in the Gulf War, which is a lesson about what we're doing now, is
to make sure that we actually complete what we begin." —
former secretary of state Madeline Albright, CNN's Late Edition,
Oct. 21, 2001.
"Albright
believes that sanctions can work if they are given a chance to work.
She opposes going to war. She believes that the Gulf crisis has
become 'much too personalized between George Bush and Saddam Hussein.'"
— Washington Post, Jan. 6, 1991.
It is bad enough
when people now say, with the benefit of a decade's hindsight, that
former president Bush should have marched on to Baghdad when they
themselves would have been the loudest critics of such a policy
at the time. (Those who were clear-sighted at the time are another
matter: click
here.) It is even worse when this criticism comes from a woman
on whose watch every aspect of our policy toward Iraq — from
sanctions to inspections — got weaker than they were when Bush
left office.
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