Kowabunga

I believe by now most of America is familiar with Senator Durbin's remarks in the U.S. Senate on Tuesday (Senate Record):

"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," Durbin said.

...

He (president Bush) could declare, as he should, that the United States will not, under any circumstances, subject any detainee to torture, or cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment. The administration could give all detainees a meaningful opportunity to challenge their detention before a neutral decisionmaker.

The direct implication of both paragraphs is that America, our President, and our military are subjecting these terrorist thugs in the same manner that political dissidents have been treated in Communist countries and to the Holocaust of the Jews.

America, according to Durbin, is behaving in the same fashion as regimes that had murdered millions of people, and comparing such brutality to the discomfitures that some of the terrorists are alleged to have been subjected to. According to Durbin, this puts America on the same level as Stalin's Soviet Union, Red China, Cambodia under the Khmer Rouge, North Korea, a host of other totalitarian (and oppressive) regimes.

Yet what has allegedly been done and in some instances, confirmed to have been done, to these prisoners, they are being handled with "kid gloves" when compared to bat-wielding Che Guevara.

Bottom line, America is at fault for what was described in that FBI report on prisoner treatment, and that treatment is of the most heinous variety.

He has continued on this diatribe a few days later, the latest being (FoxNews):

Following those remarks, the Illinois senator clarified that he was not comparing U.S. soldiers to Pol Pot, Nazis or Soviet guards, but was "attributing this form of interrogation to repressive regimes such as those that I note.

"If this indeed occurred, it does not represent American values. It does not represent what our country stands for, it is not the sort of conduct we would ever condone ... and that is the point I was making. Now, sadly, we have a situation here where some in the right-wing media have said that I have been insulting men and women in uniform. Nothing could be further from truth," Durbin said, following up under questioning by Sen. John Warner, R-Va., that he does not know if the interrogators cited in the FBI report were Americans or not.

Trying to find a way to mollify criticism, he states that he did not know if the interrogators were Americans or not...and blames the fabled right-wing media for making it sound like he was insulting our Military.

Durbin does not need the RWM to make it sound as though he is denigrating our troops. He is doing that on his own, without right-wing help.

From the Senate Journal for June 16, Durbin also said, in reference to the FBI report:

But to say that the interrogation techniques here are the kind you would expect from a repressive regime, I do not believe is an exaggeration.

Actually, the kind of tactics I would expect from the oppressive regimes that Durbin named on Tuesday would involve baseball bats, steel rods, bamboo shoots or needles under the finger nails, removal of fingers and/or other extremities.

Just one last thought on this topic today: Would Durbin or other democrats be using such rhetoric and vile comparisons if it were a Democrat in the White House? Or would Republicans do so, under similar circumstances? The answer to both questions: No!