From Lynndie England to Shaquille O'Neal

Away to prison for three years goes Lynndie England, her pleas for mercy ignored by the military panel in Fort Hood, Texas. So what's the tally so far to indicate America's revulsion over the systematic use of torture by its own forces? It tots up to a handful of rednecks. Scot-free go those who inherited a secret system of torture that goes back decades and who insured that its relentless and widening application would soon bring the practice to light. The framers of the policy go free. The lawyers who gave torture its new garb of legality plump themselves down in richly endowed chairs at our most esteemed law schools or are rewarded with seats on the Supreme Court. The senior military officers who ordered the use of dogs, isolation cells smeared with filth, water boards and other techniques designed to drive their captives mad have escaped all sanction, except for the eloquent reproofs of Maj. Gen. Antonio Taguba. Lumpen intellectuals, like Jonathan Alter and Alan Dershowitz, who clamored for torture need fear no indictment or downtime on the cable shows.

If there was a real party of opposition, maybe those who mandated the new torture system would face some sanction. If Democratic Party leaders had made an issue of it, some fiber would have been given to the calls for punitive sanction of the engineers of the torture systems. But top Democrats were silent. Torture was not an issue in the Kerry campaign. And the grunts were abandoned as surely as Kerry abandoned the rednecks of Appalachia and the working poor across America.

Thus it is, with each month that passes, the Democratic Party seems to have touched bottom. Then it promptly sinks even deeper into the ooze of cowardice and irrelevance. While Interstate 45 from Galveston to Houston was clogged with evacuees fleeing the wrath of Hurricane Rita, there was a similar jam on the Beltway round Washington, as Democrats fled the city on the eve of the September 24 antiwar rally, panic-stricken lest their presence in Washington be construed as endorsement of the rally's antiwar message.

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