If President Bush and his crew manipulated intelligence, which has always been a malicious slander, then so must have the major intelligence agencies of all other major nations in the world, which independently reached the same conclusions about Iraqi WMD. An uncanny coincidence, indeed.

If waterboarding -- which was used exceedingly sparingly by this administration -- based on authorizing legal opinions and which produced lifesaving results is so immoral, what alternatives do our feckless domestic enemies propose for gleaning information that would have prevented these attacks? Are they sorry, on balance, that lives were saved that would not have otherwise been saved?

This returns us to the Ackerman op-ed urging impeachment of Judge Bybee for "his legal distortions" concerning those "torture memos." In the liberal spirit of declaring their opinions the only reasonable opinions -- as with global warming -- Ackerman apparently believes that any lawyer who opines that tough interrogation techniques, such as waterboarding, do not constitute torture is guilty of legal distortion and is "a systematic enabler of the war crimes that have disgraced America." Ackerman allows that Bybee "may have acted in good faith," but his opinion "fails minimum tests of legal competence."

There you have it. If you disagree with this liberal professor about an issue on which reasonable people clearly disagree, you are incompetent, and unless you can demonstrate your good faith, you should be punished. The gracious professor Ackerman tells us that we shouldn't be too concerned for Bybee because "impeachment should not be confused with criminal prosecution." Phew. Now I feel better.

Though Obama has made clear on several occasions that he agrees with Conyers' positions, he is probably too shrewd to go along with his recommendations because it might interfere with his much more ambitious goals of nationalizing health care, instituting his new New Deal, and liberalizing even further the nation's pro-abortion policies. Some consolation.

Either way, don't underestimate the left's manifest willingness to criminalize and otherwise punish dissent from their dogma.