Carl Levin stops us before we elect him again

After 35 years in the U.S. Senate, Carl Levin has finally done for Michigan what the bumbling Michigan Republican Party could never do, which is to bring about his retirement.

I am not confident that Michigan will elect a Republican to succeed him next year, but for a couple of reasons I am very glad to see Carl Levin go. We talked a couple of weeks ago about Levin's silly bill that claims to close corporate loopholes, an effort that amounts to little more than chasing corporate profits all over the globe and trying to confiscate them, with little impact on the deficit. That's Carl Levin. A man of action. If there's an empty left-wing talking point that every Democrat is spewing, Levin will turn it into an empty, useless piece of legislation.

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His primary role since 1978 has been to represent the interests of the United Auto Workers, which sometimes means standing up for the Big Three Automakers and sometimes means screwing them, depending on what the UAW wants. Levin was a big opponent of free trade because he was trying to protect union jobs, and he also opposed excessive fuel-effiency standards in a blind-squirrel-nut sort of way because the standards added costs to the making of cars - costs that he would not have preferred to see take the form of corporate profits, but higher union wages and more exorbitant health care expenditures. When Detroit's Tiger Stadium had spent a decade rotting after the Tigers abandoned it for a new ballpark a few miles away, Levin shamelessly brought home $4 million in federal bacon to "preserve" the historic but crumbling edifice. It was torn down anyway. The taxpayers never got their money back. Oh well. But Levin's most outrageous gambit in recent years has been his attempt to make liars out of the Bush Administration officials who revealed a truth that Levin did not want to hear - that the waterboarding of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed had produced intelligence that helped lead to the capture of Osama Bin Laden. Among those tarred as liars by Levin are former CIA director Michael Hayden and former Secretary of Homeland Security Michael Mukasey. Levin was at it again the other day during confirmation hearings for CIA director nominee John Brennan:

LEVIN: Michael Mukasey, former attorney general [in] The Wall Street Journal: “Consider how the intelligence that led to bin Laden came to hand. It began with a disclosure from Khalid Sheikh Mohammed (KSM), who broke like a dam under the pressure of harsh interrogation techniques that included waterboarding. He loosed a torrent of information —including eventually the nickname of a trusted courier of bin Laden.” Our statement, that of the Chairman and myself, is that that statement is wrong. Do you have any information to the contrary? BRENNAN: Senator, my impression earlier was that there was information that was provided, that was useful and valuable. But as I have said, I have read the first volume of your report which raises questions about whether any of that information is accurate. LEVIN: I am no referring not to the report, but the statement Chairman Feinstein and I issued on April 27th, 2012. We flat out say that those statements are wrong. Do you have any basis to disagree with us? BRENNAN: I do not.

And what exactly is Levin's basis for calling Hayden, Mukasey and other liars? He has none. Even Brennan, who has no incentive to get in a fight with Levin about this, acknowledges that he believed Hayden and Mukasey. Clearly he is only backing down now because the Obama Administration sees no value in opposing Levin. But Levin's assault on Hayden, Mukasey, Jose Rodriguez and other Bush Administration officials who were there at the time and know what happened is simply based on his own ideological commitment to hating waterboarding. You'd think a responsible U.S. senator, even if he had a problem with waterboarding, would be honest enough to acknowledge it when it helped take down the world's leading terrorist. But that's not Carl Levin. I don't know if Michigan will send anyone better to Washington, but I'm glad we're not inflicting Carl Levin on the nation anymore. And since it was his decision, I finally have something I can thank him for.