Posted on 06/27/2005 8:55:05 AM PDT by CHARLITE
Illinois Senator Richard J. Durbin – the minority Whip and second most powerful Democrat in the United States Senate – has now joined other Democrat apologists who think (and hope) that Americans will forget what he said last week when he compared the U.S. military's treatment of al-Qaida enemy combatants in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, to the treatment doled out by mass-murderers Hitler, Stalin and Pol Pot, whose regimes in Germany, Russia and Cambodia, respectively, wantonly slaughtered tens of millions of innocent people.
For the record, approximately nine million people, including six million Jews, died in Hitler's concentration camps; nearly three million people died in Stalin's gulags, and about 2 million Cambodians died in Pol Pot's death orgy.
Durbin based his remarks on an e-mail he received from an unnamed FBI source but he significantly failed to mention that of only 530 prisoners who are under our military's watchful eye, not one of them has died – or had been tortured or beheaded!
Durbin's whiny complaints were that the terrorists sworn and determined to murder us were subjected to loud rap music and rooms either too cold or too hot.
His statement was headlined in the old media as if it had even a nanometer of historical accuracy. As columnist Vince Fiore has noted: "It's hard to figure out just who the biggest offender to our military is: A media that breathlessly reports that Guantanamo Bay prison is the `gulag' of our time' because Amnesty International said so, or a political party with members like Dick Durbin who by virtue of his true heartfelt feelings have soiled the flag and the soldiers who fight and die for it."
"These are not acts of bravery or noblesse oblige by the media and the Dick Durbins of the Democratic Party," Fiore continues. "These are the desperate flailing and thoughtless wailings of two institutions that would sell their souls for the power they once enjoyed."
Indeed, within minutes of Durbin's profoundly ignorant and malevolently vicious statement, the anti-American media in the Middle East – which is tragically identical to the leftwing media in our own country – used his words to "prove" that Americans are evil and anyone opposing them is justified in their hatred.
Leading the pack was the chief purveyor of anti-American propaganda in the Middle East, Al-Jazeera, which screeched 24/7 for days on end: "U.S. senator stands by Nazi remark."
About Durbin's astonishing ignorance, columnist Frank Gaffney, founder of the Washington-D.C.-based Center for Security Policy, wrote in The Washington Times ("Dustbin Durbin"): "How can we be critical of students who have no idea what the Revolutionary War was about, who Abraham Lincoln was or just about anything else predating the Michael Jackson trial if one of the most prominent and powerful of American legislators is so ridiculously ignorant of historical facts?"
I'm Sorry Is Not Enough
What we heard from Democrat liberals about Durbin's execrable remarks was a deafening silence. Not one of them came to the fore in the service of defending our military, supporting our troops, citing his historical ignorance or deploring his verbal attack while our country is at war.
Not one liberal Democrat disagreed with, condemned or recommended censure of Durbin's statement.
NOT ONE! Including born-again "moderate" and presidential wannabe Hillary Clinton.
For a full week, Senator Durbin arrogantly refused to apologize for his devastating defamation of our American military forces, who are risking their lives every minute of every day to make our country safer by fighting the fanatical terrorists – yes, they are terrorists and not "insurgents" – to insure that the democratic form of government that eight million Iraqis voted for under threat of death is allowed to prevail.
In fact, both Durbin and his spokespeople said he would never apologize.
But after the deluge of protesting letters, faxes, emails and phone calls Durbin received and his "friend," Chicago mayor Richard Daley (okay, that's one Democrat!) called his charges "a disgrace" – and probably after he read the respected Rasmussen poll that found only 14 percent of the American public agreed with his egregious comparison of prisoner treatment at Gitmo to Nazi tactics – Durbin finally shed a few crocodile tears as he puled out that: "'I have learned from my statement that historical parallels can be misused and misunderstood."
Some apology! The senator who fancied that his statement was based on ideological grounds was not so ideological after all! When he realized that he might not get the money he needs for his reelection and that his slander might result in even more losses for his party in 2006 and 2008, he choked out a mea culpa worth nothing at all: "I have come to understand that was a very poor choice of words…"
Aha! So the problem is his phrasing and also the misinterpretation of his remarks by a public that liberals like him consider so stupid. He then went on to praise America's fighting forces that, not days before, he had slandered by associating them with the most savage and murderous regimes in world history.
Continuing his canned apologia, Durbin said: "I sincerely regret if what I said causes anybody to misunderstand my true feelings."
There, in a nutshell is the liberal Democrats' raison-d'être – their feelings!
After he had inflicted his damage and dishonored our country and our fighting forces, Durbin wanted the American public to honor …what? Not his patriotism, to be sure. Not his integrity or his ideology or his commitment to our country – but his feelings!
As Weekly Standard editor William Kristol has written: "[Durbin] apparently still believes there could be a proper use and understanding of an `historical parallel' between American soldiers and Nazis."
Significantly, at a Democrat Party fundraiser several hours after he "apologized," the spineless Mr. Durbin was introduced – to wild applause – as a man who "has a backbone and tells it like it is."
Birds of a Feather
Durbin is not alone among liberal Democrats in shooting from the hip with anti-American statements and then – after the damage is done – "apologizing" for their intemperate or treasonous pronouncements.
Think House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, DNC Chairman Howard foot-in-mouth Dean (who called Durbin a man of "great courage"), Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid, Senators Ted Kennedy, Joseph Biden, Hillary Clinton, Charles Schumer, former Grand Kleagle Robert Byrd, whose reputedly high intelligence led him to join the murder-the-blacks marauders of the Ku Klux Klan "because I thought the Klan could provide an outlet for my talents and ambitions."
Not to be left out of this sorry mix is former president Bill Clinton, who announced that Gitmo should be shut down or cleaned up because "it's an embarrassment to the United States."
His voice "carries a lot of weight," said political commentator Argus Hamilton, "because who knows more about embarrassing the United States than Bill Clinton."
As Fiore has noted: "…absent the selling of their souls, some Democrats instead eagerly sell their country. Armed with an obsessive hatred for Bush, no statement is out of bounds, and no attempted coup to retain power is too destructive."
None Dare Call It Treason
In writing about Durbin's ignorant and inexcusable statement, intenational journalist Mark Steyn quotes liberal Democrat Senator Patrick Leahy of Vermont, who thinks Gitmo should be closed down because "…Guantanamo has drained our leadership, our credibility, and the world's good will for America at alarming rates."
But "not in 2004," Steyn says, "when Abu Ghraib was the atrocity du jour." And not in 2003, when liberals were harping on "America's `war for oil.'" And not in 2002, when liberals protested plans to "end the benign reign of good King Saddam." And not the weekend before 9/11, "when the human rights grandees of the U.N. `anti-racism' conference met in South Africa to demand America pay reparations for the Rwandan genocide and to cheer Robert Mugabe to the rafters for calling on Britain and America to `apologize unreservedly for their crimes against humanity.'"
"If you close Gitmo tomorrow," Steyn continues, "the world's anti-Americans will look around and within 48 hours alight on something else for Gulag of the Week."
This is the time, Steyn concludes, "to question Durbin's patriotism. Around the planet, folks naturally figure that, if only 100 people out of nearly 300 million get to be senators, the position must be a big deal. Yes, folks, American soldiers are Nazis and American prison camps are gulags: don't take our word for it, Senator Bigshot says so."
What else can you call it when a U.S. senator effectively aids and abets our enemies? After all, what is the definition of treason? Disloyalty to our troops, treachery that helps our enemies, and subversion that, in Durbin's case, cloaks itself in the mantle of the U.S. Senate.
Durbin's shameless liberal colleagues and our own reflexively-leftwing media hacks may forgive him and urge that his detractors "move on."
But I don't and I won't. And I suspect that the public that cherishes our fighting forces – both historically and today – believes they owe those brave men and women a debt of immeasurable gratitude for defending and protecting our magnificent country.
And that they don't and won't forgive Durbin either!
Joan Swirsky is a New York-based journalist and author who can be reached at joansharon@aol.com
Char :)
Never heard of her, but she rocks...
With Old Media assistance, redirect faux outrage upon your adversary for exposing Liberal Truths.
If the GTMO detainees never see the light of day again, it will be too soon. The world does not realize that these same rejects would leave their detention in no way 'rehabilitated' and would continue their 'I hate the world' campaign just as soon as possible, and this time with much more vigor and on a really broader scale. Can you say global terrorism?
CAN YOU SAY THANK YOU AMERICA???!!!!
Thanks for posting this, it made my day. I keep wondering does anyone even know the word treason anymore? Treason it is.
Dirtbag Durbin needs to apologize on the Senate floor.
I like what Kristol said here but, in a not sure which Kristol is going to show up moment, he was on the Fox News Sunday panel criticizing Karl Rove's statement about liberals wanting to treat terrorism as a court matter and called what Rove said indefensible.
Thanks for the ping!
Then I assume you support the immediate arrest of Senator Durbin and anyone else who has said the same thing?
Wow - this was a great article and exactly how I viewed it.
His apology is worthless - he is a traitor, and should be prosecuted as such.
Very nice ,well written article!!!
Suffice to say:
Sorry Dick Durbin,you can't put the genie back in the bottle. What a piece of work,and he is paid by the American people.
I believe Solzhenitsyn, Conquest, and others would consider that number a serious understatement. Multiply it by 10 to get closer to the truth.
What would Durbin do... ? Remind the terrorist "I'm on your side!!"
If I am ever gifted to be in the physical presence of "Senator" Durbin (probability probably <0.001%), I fully plan to attempt to make his snot locker a two-dimensional object.
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