Democratic strategist Bob Shrum says the charge that Democrats are playing politics with national security is "a smear." Democratic strategist Bob Beckel said: "I've never heard a more slanderous, disgraceful performance by a former vice president or president than I just listened to. The idea that Dick Cheney would suggest that the Obama administration was putting, for political purposes, at risk the security of the United States of America and lives of American people is outrageous."

No, Bob(s), what's outrageous is that the charges ring true. Why else, besides politics, would Obama and other Democrats have lambasted and discredited the Bush administration for years over its WOT policies and then adopt many of those very same policies, from extraordinary rendition to the NSA warrantless surveillance program to recognizing that the laws of war permit the U.S. to capture enemy combatants and detain them without trial until the conclusion of hostilities to the use of cosmetically modified military commissions, which Obama had earlier called a "legal black hole"?

If rank partisanship hasn't been at play here, how does one reconcile the Democrats' demagoguery against Bush to close Gitmo come hell or high water with congressional Democrats' present refusal to fund Gitmo's closure until Obama presents a plan concerning placement of the prisoners?

Apart from recognizing it as a partisan witch hunt, how do you explain why the Obama-Holder Justice Department condemned enhanced interrogation techniques as torture, to the point that it considered prosecuting Bush officials and its Justice Department lawyers for authorizing and recommending them, yet endorsed the Bush position on torture just weeks ago, in Demjanjuk v. Holder? How do you explain the approval of these very techniques by the Democratic leadership, including House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, when briefed by the CIA and the Bush administration?

And the money question: If, indeed, Barack Obama is so convinced that enhanced interrogation methods violate our values and the rule of law, how do you rationally explain his reservation of the authority to reinstitute the practice?

Democratic strategists are free to dramatize their manufactured indignation over the charge of subordinating our national security for political gain, but their chickens are coming home to roost. Their inconsistent, untenable, reckless positions have been exposed, and they've tied themselves in knots.

How else do you explain Obama's unhinged national security speech Thursday?