The Times gets it wrong in crit­i­ciz­ing the tor­ture bill that the House passed yes­ter­day. We aren’t Rush­ing Off a Cliff, we’re strolling, care­ful­ly and delib­er­ate­ly. Oth­er than that, the edi­to­r­i­al is dead on:

Here’s what hap­pens when this irre­spon­si­ble Con­gress rail­roads a pro­found­ly impor­tant bill to serve the mind­less pol­i­tics of a midterm elec­tion: The Bush admin­is­tra­tion uses Repub­li­cans’ fear of los­ing their major­i­ty to push through ghast­ly ideas about antiter­ror­ism that will make Amer­i­can troops less safe and do last­ing dam­age to our 217-year-old nation of laws — while actu­al­ly doing noth­ing to pro­tect the nation from ter­ror­ists. Democ­rats betray their prin­ci­ples to avoid last-minute attack ads. Our democ­ra­cy is the big loser.

And it’s espe­cial­ly dis­ap­point­ing that my con­gress­man, Den­nis Moore, was one of only a hand­ful of Democ­rats who went along with the Repub­li­can tor­ture agen­da. I under­stand the fear of being tagged as soft on what­ev­er, but some­times you have to stand up and declare that, on bal­ance, tor­ture and aban­don­ing con­sti­tu­tion­al pro­tec­tions is bad. Espe­cial­ly when you have a weak oppo­nent and Repub­li­can ener­gy is focused elsewhere.

It’s no won­der that, in a Democ­ra­cy Corps analy­sis of focus groups, “When pushed to say some­thing pos­i­tive, … unde­cid­ed vot­ers would only offer com­ments on the arrival of foot­ball sea­son or how much they like surf­ing the internet.”