I was going to write about this yesterday, but I had to get up early this morning and then worked about a 12-hour day, so I want to get this down on paper before I hit the sack.

During Thursday's Senate debate on the legislation setting up military commissions and the treatment of captured terrorists, Sen. Ted Kennedy got on the Senate floor and said that "this is about protecting Americans."

Bolshevik Storytelling.

You can find some of Kennedy's remarks here. The problem with Kennedy's argument is that he thinks everyone is stupid. Seriously. Kennedy believes that every country in the world will see how we treat terrorists who target civilians (illegal combatants) and treat our uniformed soldiers (legal combatants) likewise, should we ever be engaged in hostilities with them.

This is unlikely to say the least. First, when was the last time that a nation we were at war with treated our captured soldiers according to the Geneva Conventions? World War II Germany? Sometimes. North Korea certainly didn't. Neither did the Vietnamese. Iraq in the 1991 Gulf War? U.S. POWs in that war were treated far worse than how 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheik Mohammed was treated.

You can make an argument about which interrogation techniques we should or shouldn't use, but to base your argument on the belief that what we do with terrorists will guide what our enemies do with captured Americans is foolish. There isn't an American in Iraq or Afghanistan today who doesn't know that if he is captured that he's dead -- and probably in a gruesome fashion.

It's one thing for Kennedy to not be able to differentiate between uniformed soldiers and terrorists -- it's something else for him to believe that no one else can either.