Republicans may go nuclear if the Democrats move forward on a torture show trial of Bush administration officials. Republican Congressman Peter King said his party should move to grind all legislative activity to a halt if the Dems push forward.

“We would need to have a scorched-earth policy and use procedural means to bring the place to a halt — go to war.”

The move by Obama and his Democrat colleagues on the Hill to criminalize policy differences from the previous administration has ratcheted up the level of partisanship to a new level in Washington from an administration that was heralded as one that would be “post-partisan”. The Wall Street Journal thinks Obama and his supporters have dragged American Democracy to a new low.

Policy disputes, often bitter, are the stuff of democratic politics. Elections settle those battles, at least for a time, and Mr. Obama’s victory in November has given him the right to change policies on interrogations, Guantanamo, or anything on which he can muster enough support. But at least until now, the U.S. political system has avoided the spectacle of a new Administration prosecuting its predecessor for policy disagreements. This is what happens in Argentina, Malaysia or Peru, countries where the law is treated merely as an extension of political power.

If this analogy seems excessive, consider how Mr. Obama has framed the issue. He has absolved CIA operatives of any legal jeopardy, no doubt because his intelligence advisers told him how damaging that would be to CIA morale when Mr. Obama needs the agency to protect the country. But he has pointedly invited investigations against Republican legal advisers who offered their best advice at the request of CIA officials.

During the campaign of 2008, Republicans warned that the radical left supporting and funding Obama’s political machine would expect retribution upon the administration they hated so for eight years. These warnings were dismissed by the media as petty political sniping and part of the ultra-partisan tone in Washington that needed to be changed at the hand of Obama and his Democrat counterparts. Now, as predicted, the far left here and abroad is seeking revenge on the “cowboy” president and his officials whose efforts to keep us safe in a post 9-11 world were somehow offensive and insulting to their world view.

Mr. Obama’s decision last week to release the interrogation memos unleashed a revenge lust on the political left that he refuses to resist.

Just as with the AIG bonuses, he is trying to co-opt his left-wing base by playing to it — only to encourage it more. Within hours of Mr. Obama’s Tuesday comments, Senator Carl Levin piled on with his own accusatory Intelligence Committee report. The demands for a “special counsel” at Justice and a Congressional show trial are louder than ever, and both Europe’s left and the U.N. are signaling their desire to file their own charges against former U.S. officials.

Echoing reports that the enhanced interrogation techniques used by the Bush administration saved lives by stopping a devastating assault on Los Angeles, Congressman King said blame for a future attacks as a result of the ceasing of these tactics should lie squarely with Democrats.

“If we have another 2,000 people killed, I want Nancy Pelosi and [liberal philanthropist] George Soros, John Conyers and Pat Leahy to go to the funeral and say, ‘Your son was vaporized because we didn’t want to dump some guy’s head under water for 30 seconds.’”

Obama and the Democrats are clearly not the “post-partisan” dream they promised, and their most recent efforts to play to their radical leftist base may not only result in a slow down in legislative process, but may also leave our nation at greater risk of a terrorist attack.