The Discerning Texan
All that is necessary for evil to triumph, is for good men to do nothing.
-- Edmund Burke
-- Edmund Burke
Friday, June 17, 2005
Durbin's obscenity: generating outrage from coast to coast
As I have had more time to ponder the statements of United States Senator Dick Durbin (that would be the second ranking Democrat in the US Senate..), what started as mild anger about yet another partisan "I-hate-everything-America-stands-for-and-have-no-clue-how-to-govern" Democratic hack, has now turned into white-hot rage. And it seems I am not alone in this.
This is what "Dick" did the other day: He compared this country's very best -- men and women who put their lives on the line for us every day so that serial attack dogs like Durbin can speak whatever garbage they want -- to what may have been the three most monstrous, evil regimes in world history. Hitler and Himmler and Nazi death camps?? Stalin's Gulags?? Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge?? It is one thing for frauds wannabes like Ward Churchill to make headlines fouling the memories of the innocents who died in the WTC "little Eichmanns"; But when a Unites States Senator, a person at the very top of the Democratic leadership, makes accusations like this on the floor of the Senate, you can rest assured that the damage that is done to this country -- and to those Americans who are putting their lives on the line -- is incalculable.
This is being reported in banner headlines all over the world; it is an absolute wet dream for Al Jazeera, Le Monde, and the entire Islamist America-hating world -- this gives all of the zealots who want to murder every last one of us more fuel for their sick fire of hate. Right this minute all over the world, our enemies in this war are saying to their captive audiences: "see, even high government officials in the US admit what monsters they are... We are justified in ridding the world of this evil...etc."
This is the kind of propaganda that can be used against America for years, that can prolong the war thereby costing taxpayers billions more, but far worse, that might just cost many brave young Americans with families their lives who otherwise might have lived... It is nothing short of treason, and I do not use that word lightly.
What guys like "Dick" are counting on is that most of his constituents, indeed (he thinks) most Americans, are completely ignorant of history, as outlined by David Gelertner of Yale today:
Ignorance of history destroys our judgment. Consider Sen. Dick Durbin (D-Ill), who just compared the Guantanamo Bay detention center to Stalin's gulag and to the death camps of Hitler and Pol Pot -- an astonishing, obscene piece of ignorance. Between 15 million and 30 million people died from 1918 through 1956 in the prisons and labor camps of the Soviet gulag. Historian Robert Conquest gives some facts. A prisoner at the Kholodnaya Gora prison had to stuff his ears with bread before sleeping on account of the shrieks of women being interrogated. At the Kolyma in Siberia, inmates labored through 12-hour days in cheap canvas shoes, on almost no food, in temperatures that could go to minus-58. At one camp, 1,300 of 3,000 inmates died in one year.
Newt Gingrich also weighed in on the Sean Hannity show today, and he spoke with a lot more tact than I can muster over this:
I believe that when a US Senator compares the USA to Nazi Germany, Stalin's Soviet Union, and Pol Pot's Cambodia, and then suggesting that Americans in uniform are the equivalent of the Gestapo or the KGB or the murderers in Cambodia. That is an action that is so reprehensible and so destructive to the US that it requires a very serious response. Not a political response, not the usual rhetoric, but a very serious perceptible response.
My position is, unless Sen. Durbin comes to the Senate floor and apologizes to the men and women in uniform who he has defamed, apologizes to the US senate to which he has smeared, and apologizes to the people of the US who he has on a worldwide basis weakened by giving our enemies this kind of language to use because they can now quote the second leading Democrat in the US, saying that the US and the number two Democrat in the US Senate comparing Nazi Germany, Stalin's Soviet Union, Pol Pot's Cambodia .. I can't tell you how deeply I feel about this.
Hugh Hewitt recalls very relevant words recently written by the great Bill Whittle (btw, you should read all of Hewitt's coverage of this, it is extensive and excellent..):
And when people acting on the stage of their own moral outrage wonder when such men will be released, what do we say to them? When Osama bin Laden officially surrenders Al Qaeda on the deck of the USS Ronald Reagan?
They have no government, they have no command structure, they have no objective but death. That is their great strength, and by God, it is also their weakness, and we would be fools -- absolute drooling idiots -- to let them have it both ways.
These fanatics have been rigorously coached to lie about mistreatment and torture, and despite this transparent fact, every utterance they make is breathlessly quoted and trumpeted by the press as absolute truth. The naked human pyramids, intimidation with dogs, sexual humiliation and threat of electroshock torture that marked a day or two of mistreatment at Abu Graib were the tools used by immature and untrained individuals precisely because the methods previously employed at that location -- removal of fingers and tongues and genitalia, electrified wire brushes, and the rape and murder of relatives before the eyes of the prisoner -- are so far beyond the horizon of what American interrogators are able to imagine doing that any comparison between the two betrays the moral blindness of those making the comparison.
Is humiliation the same as torture? It is not -- that's why the words are spelled differently. To get to the heart of the difference, assume you were a prisoner at Abu Graib, and your interrogator started to remove your fingers one by one with bolt cutters. How long would it take you to beg to be posed with women's panties on your head? Yeah, I thought so.
This is not to excuse in any way the shameful behavior committed there by a few individuals who clearly are not fit to wear the uniform of the United States. They have disgraced us all and done incalculable damage. But if producing humiliation and fear is now to be defined as "torture," what international human rights organization will be appointed to help the surviving readers of The New York Times?
But probably the post that closest resembles the anger I personally feel about this reprehensible act has to be the post from (this Navy Seal's) Blog, Froggy Ruminations:
I want Durbin's job, and I want it now. I'll be damned if a US Senator is going to get away with comparing my comrades to the Gestapo, or Stalin's thugs. To the people of the Great State of Illinois, none of you have a hair on you're a$$ if you do not demand a recall of this piece of trash.
This guy isn't some benchwarmer nutjob either, he is in the Democratic leadership and as such he speaks for the rest of the 44 Senators in his caucus. If you are a Democrat US Senator and you do not have a statement of categorical disavowal of Durbin's remarks and a plea for him to recant and apologize for them released to the press by close of business today, you are wrong. Barack Obama should be burning Durbin in effigy in the streets of Chicago this weekend. It's time to step up Senator and give your "colleague" his medicine.
To the blogosphere I say this: BLOGSWARM on Durbin until his a$$ is no longer befouling a US Senate seat. No excuses, no mercy on this one. To the lefty blogosphere, you might want to jump in on this one too. If there is a shred of patriotism and decency left within you, then you have an obligation to drop the hammer on this scumbag as well.
It's enemy sympathizers like this that are dragging you and your party deeper into the fever swamps and further away from foreseeable success at the polls. UPDATE: KOS WEIGHS IN / RUSTY SMACKS DOWN
If Durbin's charges weren't so gravely evil, they would be funny. Everyone can laugh at a moonbat; moonbat mockery is the foundation of the blogosphere. For instance this moron, Morgan Reynolds who was a former Bush administration official claims that the World Trade Center was destroyed by "controlled demolition" charges and that there's no proof that planes actually hit the towers. Now that's a moonbat we can all laugh at, mock, and heap scorn upon. Here's Durbin in his Senate testimony quoting an FBI agent: (Audio via Radioblogger)
"On a couple of occasions, I entered interview rooms to find a detainee chained hand and foot in a fetal position to the floor, with no chair, food or water. Most times they urinated or defecated on themselves, and had been left there for 18-24 hours or more. On one occasion, the air conditioning had been turned down so far and the temperature was so cold in the room, that the barefooted detainee was shaking with cold. . . . On another occasion, the [air conditioner] had been turned off, making the temperature in the unventilated room well over 100 degrees. The detainee was almost unconscious on the floor, with a pile of hair next to him. He had apparently been literally pulling his hair out throughout the night. On another occasion, not only was the temperature unbearably hot, but extremely loud rap music was being played in the room, and had been since the day before, with the detainee chained hand and foot in the fetal position on the tile floor."
'If I read this to you and did not tell you that it was an FBI agent describing what Americans had done to prisoners in their control, you would most certainly believe this must have been done by Nazis, Soviets in their gulags, or some mad regime--Pol Pot or others--that had no concern for human beings. Sadly, that is not the case. This was the action of Americans in the treatment of their prisoners.'
Listen up folks, I spent 5 days and nights in the surfzone in Coronado in February of 1992, so don't tell me Gitmo A/C is torture! One night in Hell Week, my swim buddy and I pissed on each other while shivering in an embrace to try to get warm. One of my classmates had the hair on the top of his head rubbed off by the inflatable boat we all carried because he lost his hat in the surf (He is still bald from it). How about a weeks worth of Immediate Action Drills and buddy carries in August out in the Eastern California desert in temperatures approaching 130F?
What I've done is nothing compared to my brothers in Afghanistan and Iraq these past 4 years. They have endured indescribable hardships in order to kill and capture the people who brought down the towers and those who support them. To impugn them and their sacrifices by comparing them to Nazis, gulag guards, and the Khmer Rouge is the basest and most shameful act of ingratitude and treason that I have ever heard from the mouth of a sitting US Senator. Durbin stands alone in the pantheon of political hate speech, and he deserves to be recalled in shame from his position of responsibility.
UPDATE: CONTACT INFO FOR DURBIN
Washington, DC: phone (202) 224-2152; fax (202)228-0400
Chicago, IL: phone (312) 353-4952; fax (312)353-0150
Springfield, IL: phone (217) 492-4062; fax (217)492-4382
Marion, IL: phone (618) 998-8812; fax (618) 997-0176
UNCLE JIMBO TAKES DURBIN ON A TRIP DOWN MEMORY LANE
Now that gets pretty damn close to what I am feeling about this man. And if any of you out there are with me, let's join together and send this sorry excuse for an American back to Illinois where he cannot do anymore harm to his country. The Senate is spineless if they do not Censure this man 99-0 -- and I am talking about Democrats too... This man is a disgrace, even to what is an already disgraceful party. He's got to go.
This is what "Dick" did the other day: He compared this country's very best -- men and women who put their lives on the line for us every day so that serial attack dogs like Durbin can speak whatever garbage they want -- to what may have been the three most monstrous, evil regimes in world history. Hitler and Himmler and Nazi death camps?? Stalin's Gulags?? Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge?? It is one thing for frauds wannabes like Ward Churchill to make headlines fouling the memories of the innocents who died in the WTC "little Eichmanns"; But when a Unites States Senator, a person at the very top of the Democratic leadership, makes accusations like this on the floor of the Senate, you can rest assured that the damage that is done to this country -- and to those Americans who are putting their lives on the line -- is incalculable.
This is being reported in banner headlines all over the world; it is an absolute wet dream for Al Jazeera, Le Monde, and the entire Islamist America-hating world -- this gives all of the zealots who want to murder every last one of us more fuel for their sick fire of hate. Right this minute all over the world, our enemies in this war are saying to their captive audiences: "see, even high government officials in the US admit what monsters they are... We are justified in ridding the world of this evil...etc."
This is the kind of propaganda that can be used against America for years, that can prolong the war thereby costing taxpayers billions more, but far worse, that might just cost many brave young Americans with families their lives who otherwise might have lived... It is nothing short of treason, and I do not use that word lightly.
What guys like "Dick" are counting on is that most of his constituents, indeed (he thinks) most Americans, are completely ignorant of history, as outlined by David Gelertner of Yale today:
Ignorance of history destroys our judgment. Consider Sen. Dick Durbin (D-Ill), who just compared the Guantanamo Bay detention center to Stalin's gulag and to the death camps of Hitler and Pol Pot -- an astonishing, obscene piece of ignorance. Between 15 million and 30 million people died from 1918 through 1956 in the prisons and labor camps of the Soviet gulag. Historian Robert Conquest gives some facts. A prisoner at the Kholodnaya Gora prison had to stuff his ears with bread before sleeping on account of the shrieks of women being interrogated. At the Kolyma in Siberia, inmates labored through 12-hour days in cheap canvas shoes, on almost no food, in temperatures that could go to minus-58. At one camp, 1,300 of 3,000 inmates died in one year.
Newt Gingrich also weighed in on the Sean Hannity show today, and he spoke with a lot more tact than I can muster over this:
I believe that when a US Senator compares the USA to Nazi Germany, Stalin's Soviet Union, and Pol Pot's Cambodia, and then suggesting that Americans in uniform are the equivalent of the Gestapo or the KGB or the murderers in Cambodia. That is an action that is so reprehensible and so destructive to the US that it requires a very serious response. Not a political response, not the usual rhetoric, but a very serious perceptible response.
My position is, unless Sen. Durbin comes to the Senate floor and apologizes to the men and women in uniform who he has defamed, apologizes to the US senate to which he has smeared, and apologizes to the people of the US who he has on a worldwide basis weakened by giving our enemies this kind of language to use because they can now quote the second leading Democrat in the US, saying that the US and the number two Democrat in the US Senate comparing Nazi Germany, Stalin's Soviet Union, Pol Pot's Cambodia .. I can't tell you how deeply I feel about this.
Hugh Hewitt recalls very relevant words recently written by the great Bill Whittle (btw, you should read all of Hewitt's coverage of this, it is extensive and excellent..):
And when people acting on the stage of their own moral outrage wonder when such men will be released, what do we say to them? When Osama bin Laden officially surrenders Al Qaeda on the deck of the USS Ronald Reagan?
They have no government, they have no command structure, they have no objective but death. That is their great strength, and by God, it is also their weakness, and we would be fools -- absolute drooling idiots -- to let them have it both ways.
These fanatics have been rigorously coached to lie about mistreatment and torture, and despite this transparent fact, every utterance they make is breathlessly quoted and trumpeted by the press as absolute truth. The naked human pyramids, intimidation with dogs, sexual humiliation and threat of electroshock torture that marked a day or two of mistreatment at Abu Graib were the tools used by immature and untrained individuals precisely because the methods previously employed at that location -- removal of fingers and tongues and genitalia, electrified wire brushes, and the rape and murder of relatives before the eyes of the prisoner -- are so far beyond the horizon of what American interrogators are able to imagine doing that any comparison between the two betrays the moral blindness of those making the comparison.
Is humiliation the same as torture? It is not -- that's why the words are spelled differently. To get to the heart of the difference, assume you were a prisoner at Abu Graib, and your interrogator started to remove your fingers one by one with bolt cutters. How long would it take you to beg to be posed with women's panties on your head? Yeah, I thought so.
This is not to excuse in any way the shameful behavior committed there by a few individuals who clearly are not fit to wear the uniform of the United States. They have disgraced us all and done incalculable damage. But if producing humiliation and fear is now to be defined as "torture," what international human rights organization will be appointed to help the surviving readers of The New York Times?
But probably the post that closest resembles the anger I personally feel about this reprehensible act has to be the post from (this Navy Seal's) Blog, Froggy Ruminations:
I want Durbin's job, and I want it now. I'll be damned if a US Senator is going to get away with comparing my comrades to the Gestapo, or Stalin's thugs. To the people of the Great State of Illinois, none of you have a hair on you're a$$ if you do not demand a recall of this piece of trash.
This guy isn't some benchwarmer nutjob either, he is in the Democratic leadership and as such he speaks for the rest of the 44 Senators in his caucus. If you are a Democrat US Senator and you do not have a statement of categorical disavowal of Durbin's remarks and a plea for him to recant and apologize for them released to the press by close of business today, you are wrong. Barack Obama should be burning Durbin in effigy in the streets of Chicago this weekend. It's time to step up Senator and give your "colleague" his medicine.
To the blogosphere I say this: BLOGSWARM on Durbin until his a$$ is no longer befouling a US Senate seat. No excuses, no mercy on this one. To the lefty blogosphere, you might want to jump in on this one too. If there is a shred of patriotism and decency left within you, then you have an obligation to drop the hammer on this scumbag as well.
It's enemy sympathizers like this that are dragging you and your party deeper into the fever swamps and further away from foreseeable success at the polls. UPDATE: KOS WEIGHS IN / RUSTY SMACKS DOWN
If Durbin's charges weren't so gravely evil, they would be funny. Everyone can laugh at a moonbat; moonbat mockery is the foundation of the blogosphere. For instance this moron, Morgan Reynolds who was a former Bush administration official claims that the World Trade Center was destroyed by "controlled demolition" charges and that there's no proof that planes actually hit the towers. Now that's a moonbat we can all laugh at, mock, and heap scorn upon. Here's Durbin in his Senate testimony quoting an FBI agent: (Audio via Radioblogger)
"On a couple of occasions, I entered interview rooms to find a detainee chained hand and foot in a fetal position to the floor, with no chair, food or water. Most times they urinated or defecated on themselves, and had been left there for 18-24 hours or more. On one occasion, the air conditioning had been turned down so far and the temperature was so cold in the room, that the barefooted detainee was shaking with cold. . . . On another occasion, the [air conditioner] had been turned off, making the temperature in the unventilated room well over 100 degrees. The detainee was almost unconscious on the floor, with a pile of hair next to him. He had apparently been literally pulling his hair out throughout the night. On another occasion, not only was the temperature unbearably hot, but extremely loud rap music was being played in the room, and had been since the day before, with the detainee chained hand and foot in the fetal position on the tile floor."
'If I read this to you and did not tell you that it was an FBI agent describing what Americans had done to prisoners in their control, you would most certainly believe this must have been done by Nazis, Soviets in their gulags, or some mad regime--Pol Pot or others--that had no concern for human beings. Sadly, that is not the case. This was the action of Americans in the treatment of their prisoners.'
Listen up folks, I spent 5 days and nights in the surfzone in Coronado in February of 1992, so don't tell me Gitmo A/C is torture! One night in Hell Week, my swim buddy and I pissed on each other while shivering in an embrace to try to get warm. One of my classmates had the hair on the top of his head rubbed off by the inflatable boat we all carried because he lost his hat in the surf (He is still bald from it). How about a weeks worth of Immediate Action Drills and buddy carries in August out in the Eastern California desert in temperatures approaching 130F?
What I've done is nothing compared to my brothers in Afghanistan and Iraq these past 4 years. They have endured indescribable hardships in order to kill and capture the people who brought down the towers and those who support them. To impugn them and their sacrifices by comparing them to Nazis, gulag guards, and the Khmer Rouge is the basest and most shameful act of ingratitude and treason that I have ever heard from the mouth of a sitting US Senator. Durbin stands alone in the pantheon of political hate speech, and he deserves to be recalled in shame from his position of responsibility.
UPDATE: CONTACT INFO FOR DURBIN
Washington, DC: phone (202) 224-2152; fax (202)228-0400
Chicago, IL: phone (312) 353-4952; fax (312)353-0150
Springfield, IL: phone (217) 492-4062; fax (217)492-4382
Marion, IL: phone (618) 998-8812; fax (618) 997-0176
UNCLE JIMBO TAKES DURBIN ON A TRIP DOWN MEMORY LANE
Now that gets pretty damn close to what I am feeling about this man. And if any of you out there are with me, let's join together and send this sorry excuse for an American back to Illinois where he cannot do anymore harm to his country. The Senate is spineless if they do not Censure this man 99-0 -- and I am talking about Democrats too... This man is a disgrace, even to what is an already disgraceful party. He's got to go.
