"Does Planned Parenthood observe the Geneva Conventions?"

The American Spectator's George Neumayr smartly eviscerates the Democratic opposition to Alberto Gonzales.

When Ted Kennedy and company are beating their chests in moral indignation, perhaps a Republican on the Judiciary Committee could ask: Does your definition of torture cover abortion procedures? Will the protections you extend to terrorists ever be extended to unborn children? Do your friends at Planned Parenthood observe the Geneva Conventions?

The moral authority of Democrats who give more rights to terrorists than unborn children is nil. But desperate to regain "values" ground on Republicans, the Democrats will make a show of treating Gonzales as their moral inferior. The same Democrats who couldn't abide John Ashcroft's piety at the confirmation hearings last time will appear quite pious themselves, chastising Gonzales for a lack of moral delicacy.

If Gonzales had written a memo endorsing free abortions at Abu Ghraib and military hospitals, the Democrats would hail him as a sophisticated legal mind. But since he won't extend habeas corpus to al Qaeda, he lacks the "value system" to defend the Constitution. Gonzales shouldn't feel too bad: none of the framers of the Constitution were they alive today would get confirmed by the Democrats either. Abraham Lincoln wouldn't get confirmed either. After all, he suspended habeas corpus too. Thanks to judges appointed by the Democrats, terrorists enjoy more rights than did American spies during the Civil War.

But that's just an eye-catching start.

To get Gonzales to cry uncle, the Democrats are trying to pin Abu Ghraib on his very sane judgment that the Geneva Conventions do not apply to terrorists. As if the deranged soldiers responsible for that debacle were carefully sifting through his legal opinions for permission to construct human pyramids of prisoners. The Democrats still act as if Abu Ghraib was the byproduct of a strict, right-wing military culture when it reality it reflected the libertine Clinton-era policies that the Democrats won't let the military discard -- unisex policing and training, a don't ask, don't care ethos, a relaxation of military discipline and recruitment standards in the name of making the military "more like America," etc.

The demented hijinks at Abu Ghraib didn't reflect the strictness of Donald Rumsfeld or the legal judgment of Alberto Gonzales but the looseness and sickness of a pop domestic culture the Democrats have worked hard to smuggle into a military they regard as reactionary. If soldiers at Abu Ghraib were more interested in the Tailhook Convention than the Geneva Convention, that is the libertine left's fault, not Gonzales's.