Teddy Kennedy Needs to Work on His Demagoguery

Teddy Kennedy made another one of his famous bleary-eyed Senate floor speeches denouncing the destruction of the CIA interrogation tapes and claiming that they were destroyed in response to the Dem victory in the 2006 election and comparing the CIA actions to a Watergate-like coverup. Classic Teddy demagoguery. One little problem:

Lawyers within the clandestine branch of the Central Intelligence Agency gave written approval in advance to the destruction in 2005 of hundreds of hours of videotapes documenting interrogations of two lieutenants from Al Qaeda, according to a former senior intelligence official with direct knowledge of the episode.

So, the CIA, predicting a Dem victory in 2006, destroyed the tapes over a year before the election because they feared Dem investigations. Would it hurt Teddy even once to get his facts straight before he begins bloviating on the Senate floor?

By the way, regardless of the reasons for the destruction, it was the right thing to do. There's absolutely no benefit to anybody to retain those tapes and risk having them get out onto YouTube or somewhere else where they could place CIA officers at risk. Plus, given how quickly waterboarding has gone from a method approved by Dems to politically incorrect torture, destroying the tapes makes good sense.

After all, if Nixon had just destroyed his Oval Office tapes before the recordings and transcripts were released, he would have served out his whole second term.