When it comes to national security, Democrats are serving up softballs for John McCain. But he better be getting a lot of batting practice so he can knock it out of the park once the general-election campaign gets in full swing.

Democrats downplay the scope of terrorist threat and constantly obstruct our efforts to pursue this "overblown" enemy.

Having run out of all other excuses to oppose extending the bill that permits warrantless monitoring of international conversations between terrorists, they have settled on the specious argument that the private telecoms don't deserve immunity from frivolous lawsuits commandeered by the trial bar.

It doesn't matter to Democrats that these companies patriotically responded to the president's call to assist with surveillance and relied on his assurances that they would be acting legally. What matters is that trial lawyers are among the biggest contributors to the Democratic Party -- the party that supposedly eschews special-interest politics. The trial bar must be paid back whenever possible, even if it means telecoms will not cooperate in the future for fear of stepping into a malicious litigation trap.

Democrats say they'd allow the legislation to pass if Republicans would agree to sever the immunity provisions from the bill for later treatment. But everyone knows -- except voters the Democrats are trying to dupe -- that if you carve out that portion of the bill, Democrats will try to prevent it from ever coming to the floor.

Democrats duplicitously claim the GOP just wants to protect another group of evil corporations. But can they point to one real victim who the telecoms have abused while assisting the government in saving American lives? Can they point to a real motive the telecoms would have in harming such nonexistent victims? Enough is enough.

Also, Democrats passed a bill -- which the president then vetoed -- to prohibit the United States from performing any interrogation techniques not described in the Army Field Manual. National Review Online's editors praised the president's veto, pointing to the recklessness of this bill because it would telegraph to the enemy all available interrogation techniques and enable the enemy to train to resist those methods.

Even on Iraq, Democrats have a losing position if Republicans will just make their case. First, McCain can point to the success of the surge and his early support for it. If Obama and other Democrats had gotten their way, we might be well on our way to losing in Iraq.

But Democrats say we should never have attacked and that al-Qaeda wouldn't be there if we hadn't. We should have finished the job in Afghanistan, they say, because that's where al-Qaeda trained to attack us on 9/11.

But has anyone ever challenged the Democrats on the absurdity of this position? If we were justified in attacking al-Qaeda in Afghanistan because they trained there to attack us, then why aren't we justified in fighting them in Iraq since they are attacking us there? Continued...