Durbin the Turban's gross analogy

Mark Steyn sums up Dick's views better than anyone else. Full column here (PLEASE read it!), excerpts snipped below:

Last Tuesday, Mr. Durbin, Illinois Democrat, quoted a report of U.S. "atrocities" at Guantanamo and then added:

"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."

Er, well, your average low-wattage senator might. But I wouldn't. The "atrocities" he enumerated -- "Not only was the temperature unbearably hot, but extremely loud rap music was being played in the room" -- are not characteristic of the Nazis, the Soviets or Pol Pot, and, at the end, the body count in Gitmo was a lot lower. That's to say, it was zero, which would have been counted a poor day's work in Auschwitz or Siberia or the killing fields of Cambodia.

But give Mr. Durbin credit. Every third-rate hack on every European newspaper can do the Americans-are-Nazis shtick. Amnesty International has already declared Guantanamo the "gulag of our times." But I do believe the senator is the first to compare the U.S. armed forces with the blood-drenched thugs of Pol Pot's Khmer Rouge. Way to go, Senator. If you had a dime for every crackpot Web site that takes up your thoughtful historical comparison, you would be able to retire to the Caribbean and spend the rest of your days torturing yourself with hot weather and loud music, as well as inappropriately provocative women and insufficient choice of hors d'oeuvre and all the other shameful atrocities at Guantanamo.

For those who like to throw out the "gulag" references and other semanticly-challenged words:

Just for the record, some 15 million to 30 million Soviets died in the gulag; some 6 million Jews died in the Nazi camps; some 2 million Cambodians -- one-third of the country's population -- died in the killing fields. Nobody's died in Gitmo, not even from having Christina Aguilera played to them excessively loudly. The comparison is deranged, and deeply insulting not just to the U.S. military but to the millions of relatives of those dead Russians, Jews and Cambodians, who, unlike Mr. Durbin, know what real atrocities are.

Had Mr. Durbin said, "Why, these atrocities are so terrible you would almost believe it was an account of the activities of my distinguished colleague Robert C. Byrd's fellow Klansmen," that would have been a little closer to the ballpark but still way out.

Oh, if I had a dime for every time the MSM reminded us of Byrd's KKK past...I would have...uh, maybe, a dime? Tops? Anyway, continuing:

Spot the odd one out: (1) mass starvation, (2) gas chambers, (3) mountains of skulls, (4) lousy infidel pop music at full volume. One of these is not the same as the others, and Mr. Durbin doesn't have the excuse of being some airhead celeb or an Ivy League professor. He's the Senate Judiciary Committee's second-ranking Democrat. Don't they have an insanity clause?

Durbin, Dean, and Rangel are proof that they have no such clause. Finally, in closing:

The senator from Illinois' comparisons are as tired as they're grotesque. They add nothing useful to the debate. But 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. Hence, headlines in the Arab world like "U.S. senator stands by Nazi remark." That's al Jazeera, where the senator from al-Inois is now a big hero -- for slandering his own country, for confirming the lurid propaganda of its enemies. Yes, folks, American soldiers are Nazis and U.S. prison camps are gulags. Don't take our word for it, Sen. Bigshot says so.

This isn't a Republican versus Democrat thing; it's about senior Democrats who are so over-invested in their hatred of a passing administration that they've signed on to the nuttiest slurs of the lunatic fringe.

It would be heartening to think Mr. Durbin will himself now be subjected to some serious torture. Not real torture, of course; I don't mean using Pol Pot techniques and playing the Celine Dion Christmas album really loud to him.

But he should at least be made a little uncomfortable about what he's done -- in a time of war, making an inflammatory libel against his country's military that has no value whatever except to America's enemies. Shame on him, and shame on those fellow senators and Democrats who by their refusal to condemn him endorse his slander.

I've known all along that the left's seething hatred of Bush is so intense that they'd gladly sacrifice American's best interests in order to score political points. If we lose soldiers, that's bad news for America...which is good news for liberals. That, my friends, is just sick.