It's a shame that
President Bush, Senator Frist, and the Right-Wing Blogospheric
Noise Machine can't summon the same level of outrage they've mustered over Durbin's comments over the FBI account he read in the paragraph before - or the countless others like it. You won't find that paragraph, unfortunately, in the news accounts of the latest from the GOP's manufactured outrage machine. And don't hold your breath for a word from Bush or Frist this week to condemn the use of starving and freezing as interrogation techniques.
Instead, they're accusing Senator Durbin of comparing all of America's servicemen and servicewomen to Nazis, a charge as willfully inaccurate as Frist's
claim that Durbin called Guanatanamo a "death camp" (that's what
happens when you get all of your news from the (
Washington Times). While Durbin's phrasing is awkward, his plain meaning is clearly not that America is a Nazi state but rather that torture is a practice which better befits an oppressive regime than the United States. Leaving people restrained without water in oppressive heat to defecate on themselves, Durbin reminds us, is a violation of the values of this country. The obvious question, then, for Durbin's critics is this: Do you see leaving people restrained without water in oppressive heat to defecate on themselves as as expression of the values of this country. Only a truly perverse definition of patriotism would demand, when we see unamerican crimes perpetrated under the American flag, that we change our values as a country to justify our behavior rather than the other way around. There's no need to mention Nazis in order to make this point. But there's no justification for reading it as a smear of the US as Nazi Germany or men and women in the service as Nazis.
The latter - the accusation that Durbin attacked Americans in the military - is even more insidious than the accusation that he attacked America itself. The implication is that anyone who criticizes a policy military personnel carry out is expressing scorn, distrust, or murderous rage towards every American in the service (this is analagous to the strategy Thomas Frank documents in One Market Under God of dismissing criticisms of business as expressions of elitism towards the American consumer). It's a strategy we saw in the Presidential debates, as Bush implied that criticism of our Iraq policy showed a lack of faith in our troops in Iraq. It's a strikingly tendentious rhetorical move and a pox on a discourse we desperately need to be having as a nation.
Most of all, pretending to hear criticism of the policy as an attack on the troops is a show of incredible cowardice. Faced with much-deserved rhetorical volleys, George Bush is essentially dragging American soldiers in front of him as an unwitting buffer between himself and the rest of the American people. In this rhetorical draft, American soldiers are called to act as a symbolic first line of defense against justified outrage over the administration. Never mind the number of those soldiers and their families who share that outrage, or who have no interest in being drafted -voiceless - into ideological warfare on behalf of the chickenhawks and policies which lead to needless death. Critics of torture and critics of war are taking on our leaders, not our troops. That those leaders, rather than defending their choices, make a show of rising to defend the honor of the troops just shows how little shame they have.
Josh