I like Durbin, he's a fine Senator, but still, he could learn a thing or two.
Eric Zorn
Durbin should have stood up for his opinion
http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/opinion/chi-0506230236jun23,0,1250714.column?page=2&coll=chi-
ed_opinion_columnists-utl
Published June 23, 2005
Dick Durbin needs a new speechwriter.
First, there was that needless line about the Nazis, Soviet gulags and Pol Pot in an otherwise tight, 3,000-word address last week to his U.S. Senate colleagues about treatment of suspected terrorists held at Guantanamo Bay.
Then there was the wheedling, weepy, invertebrate tone of his conditional apology--six variations on the weasel words, "If I have offended anyone, then..."--Tuesday evening just hours after his fellow Democrat and longtime supporter Mayor Richard Daley branded his earlier remarks "a disgrace."
Not that I'm applying for the job or anything, but here is what Durbin should have said Tuesday:
"It's come to my attention that the mayor of the largest city in my home state raged at a news conference earlier today that I said our soldiers `in Guantanamo Bay are Nazis.'
"I'm surprised. Though Mayor Daley can't even pronounce Guantanamo--he says it `Gwa-ta-mahn-o.' And even though he blithely presided over the Cook County state's attorney's office during the biggest police-torture scandal in Chicago's history. And even though he mistily invoked `what America's all about' at the news conference in which he announced a `presumed guilty' program of posting photos on the Internet of people arrested but not yet convicted in prostitution stings.
"Still, I thought he'd be able to see through the false logic and deceptive paraphrases offered by my critics and focus his concern where it belongs: On what FBI reports say is being done to prisoners at Gwan-tahn-a-mo in the name of the United States of America:
"These reports describe detainees `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. ... shaking with cold. ... [or] made unbearably hot.'
"As I said last week, quoting Colin Powell: The use of such bestial interrogation techniques will `reverse over a century of U.S. policy and practice ... undermine the protections of the law of war for our own troops ... [and] undermine public support among critical allies, making military cooperation more difficult to sustain.'
"It is immoral, ineffective and un-American for us to torture prisoners. The America I believe in has long been the world's beacon for human rights and dignity; for fairness and due process of law. T
"The America I believe in is better than the America on display in our overseas prisons. The America I believe in inspires rather than disgusts the international community.
"If anything I said caused you to believe that I was equating American soldiers with Nazis or equating American leaders with Adolf Hitler or Pol Pot, then you are an idiot.
"I said nothing of the kind.
"I said that our mistreatment of wartime prisoners is of the sort you'd expect to see in a brutal, totalitarian dictatorship, not in a nation that has long congratulated itself on its exceptionally high standards of liberty and law.
"It's a troubling similarity. It's a warning that we're slipping.
"But it's not--duh!--even close to an across-the-board assertion of equivalence.
"Hey, I'm sorry I played `the Hitler card.' It always inflames, distracts and confuses, and it never convinces. In this case, it let opportunists ignore my main point and gasbag instead about my unnecessarily overwrought metaphor and the many, obvious ways in which America is not Nazi Germany.
"But if you expect me to come before you and bite my quivering lips as I apologize to those who were spun into a dudgeon by the contemptible effort to draw attention from these infamous allegations, you'll be disappointed.
"I will not babble out a mewling defense of my patriotism to those with the vile audacity to have questioned it.
"A true patriot loves what his country stands for, not necessarily what his country does, and I will not shrink from holding America to her ideals.
"I will not dignify with a response the charge that my ill-advised hyperbole diminished the undiminishable horror of the Holocaust, impugned our soldiers or harmed our reputation.
"Nonsense.
"The problem with our reputation is poorly chosen policies, not poorly chosen words. And that, Mr. Mayor and my fellow senators, is the `disgrace' we should be talking about."