Who’s Unpatriotic Now?
Who’s Unpatriotic Now?
This email from MoveAmericaForward just landed in my inbox. I think it’s fair to say that it echoes most commentary from the right about this issue (italics added):
Some left-wing politicians (like Illinois Senator Dick Durbin) have taken to the airwaves and accused American servicemen and women of engaging in conduct akin to the “Nazis, Soviets in their gulags, or some mad regime — Pol Pot or others.”
We’re not making this up.
A liberal Democrat U.S. SENATOR is accusing our troops of acting like Nazi soldiers or the Soviet Communists who ran the gulags that tortured political prisoners.
Even immediately after Durbin’s remarks were publicized, it was clear to all but the most cynical/partisan critics that he did not actually see U.S. soldiers in the same light as Nazis.
But now, after numerous explanations of what he meant, and a clarification from Durbin himself, it’s just downright dishonest to say that Durbin is accusing our troops of acting like Nazis.
Which leads to a question that conservatives and the media (which is working on its fifth day of coverage of this story) might ask: at what point does it become unpatriotic to mislead our soldiers into believing that one of their own senators has accused them of acting like Nazis? How does that improve their morale?
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Here’s Durbin’s originale comment, for reference (it was omitted from Nico’s posting):
“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.”
June 20th, 2005 at 4:16 pmCan’t you at least admit that what Durbin said was wrong? How can you write that whole post andnot mention that once? Do you really believe what he said was true??
June 20th, 2005 at 4:36 pmAdmit what? READ what he said. Carefully, don’t just search for the words NAZI, SOVIET, GULAG, and POL POT in the same sentence with AMERICANS.
I’ll explain it slowly if you need me to.
June 20th, 2005 at 4:47 pmCref you ignorant slut. Well, I know that was humor when Dan Akroyd used it on Jane Curtain, but it is meant with all seriousness to you. Christ!
June 20th, 2005 at 4:55 pmand yes. What he said was wholelly and completely true. If you read the statements without knowing the country of origin, you would have thought those atrocities took place in Nazi concentration camps or the Soviet gulogs. Learn to read or we will start flaming you here.
June 20th, 2005 at 4:57 pmEven the loony Andrew Sullivan …
DURBIN SAID NOTHING WRONG: I’ve now read and re-read Senator Dick Durbin’s comments on interrogation techniques at Guantanamo Bay. They are completely, perfectly respectable…
June 20th, 2005 at 5:15 pmHere’s a fine example of why pugs are the way they are..
They cannot comprehend simple statements. They have trouble applying logic.
No matter what you say or do they still make retarded statements like “Bush is the best Prez ever”.
Just today Bush has admitted he’s a failure by saying he needs to improve his reputation..
There is no getting thru to these braindead people.
We have to accept the fact that not all Americans are intelligent.
P.S. Dick Durbin is my senator and I think he’s an alright guy.
June 20th, 2005 at 5:32 pmMine as well.
June 20th, 2005 at 5:46 pmI don’t give a crap what Durbin said but I agree with his wondering…
June 20th, 2005 at 6:03 pmWhy the hell are our American brothers and sisters being allowed and or condoned to commit torture in the first place?!
Oh Please – Don’t you get it – you say something that the right wing can spin against you and they do. The issue isn’t that the Repubs spin, it’s that the Dems care what they say – the Dems have no guts – that’s why we need a third party to represent the people – the Repubs and the Dems play this game of one upping each other in the ratings war – and you argue over whether they’re playing fairly –
Spend your time supporting Conyers and other Dems who want an Iraq withdrawal and impeachment proceedings and don’t give so much energy to this game of spin
June 20th, 2005 at 6:09 pmI didn’t give this spin, but it is not going away that easily LeCar. How fast can you create a 3rd party that can beat the other two biggies? I’m curious.
June 20th, 2005 at 6:52 pmHell, I’d join.
June 20th, 2005 at 6:52 pmWhy are we even asking these questions about Durbin and continuing the right-wing arguments for them? The focus ought to be on the Bush administration for sanctioning torture, prisoner renditions, secret prisons and allowing the torture to continue.
June 20th, 2005 at 7:02 pmHopefully Durbin’s actions and statements will encourage other dems and repugs to also speak up and challenge these facsists. There needs to be more dissension from the congress, media, and public.
June 20th, 2005 at 7:04 pmWhile I agree that the abuses at Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo, and elsewhere are worthy of nothing but scorn and condemnation, I question Durbin’s sanity for giving the Administration a set of rather obvious talking points with which to skew the discussion away from the matter of substance and off into yet another extraneous topic. Wasn’t he paying attention when the Bushies latched onto the word “gulag” in the recent Amnesty International controversy.
You have to wonder when things like this happen whether the speaker is interested in correcting the problem or in just making headlines.
The Cluemobile missed a stop.
June 20th, 2005 at 8:36 pmSteve -
I think you’ve missed something. Durbin’s comments got play EVERYWHERE, including being shouted by every wingnut from here to eternity. I know of a number of moderate folks who were pro-war, but are NOT pro-torture. They’re severely disturbed by the ideas that are coming out now.
Durbin’s comments propelled this into the mainstream media. Without that right-wing outrage, this would have been a non-story. Right wing outrage has pushed this into the spotlight where moderate individuals are starting to get outraged too – but not in the way that the right-wingers are.
The same is happening with the Downing Street Memos. The more the right gets outraged, the more press they get. The right has been “running” the media for a decade now with their outrage machine, but these are blowing up in their faces.
If they keep it up the outrage machine may just explode, but not in the way that the wingers might want it to.
June 20th, 2005 at 8:54 pmCan’t you at least admit that what Durbin said was wrong? How can you write that whole post andnot mention that once? Do you really believe what he said was true??
Comment by Creff
Wrong? How was it wrong? You mean it was “politically incorrect”, don’t you? As far as “Gulag” goes, did you all just develop short term memory loss? “No man, no problem.” Does that ring a bell? Fvck the pugs, this administration and what they think they think.
June 20th, 2005 at 9:00 pmSusan suggest in #7 that Repugs can’t understand a statement. I would say they understand it well enough but choose to deliberately distort what it says for partisan exploitation purposes. To me that is evil, especially since they do it diliberately mislead those dumb enough to believe them.
June 20th, 2005 at 9:35 pmSkid
June 20th, 2005 at 10:29 pmWe need a person who can state the truth and not fear the spin
How can anyone say that Durbin was wrong?
June 20th, 2005 at 10:32 pmHe’s stating the truth – our forces, our children, are being trained and put into situations where they act in inhuman ways. The responsibility lies with the commanders and generals, those who hide in the background like cowards sending young children to do their dirty work.
Remember Dylan’s words
“Damn you masters or war, you that build the big guns”
“You hide in your mansions while the young people’s blood flows out of their bodies and is buried in the mud”
I don’t think there’s any stronger statement to be made than that about the madness that this administration pretends is a policy.
And Skid
One more thing – Biden ain’t that person who can state the truth and not fear the spin
Biden is a spin master and he, like Kerry, will go the way of the pretenders. He’s a Great Pretender.
June 20th, 2005 at 10:34 pmDid any of you read what he said? What he said was not truth, it was speculation. Yes, Americans made some terror suspects cold, and some hot while listening to Rap music. But how can anyone confuse that treatment with torture and disrespect for Humans? How can you read the FBI report and think it was from Pol Pot when most of these innocent civilians did not leave alive or without permanent scars and injuries?
Surely everything Conservative is not correct, but it is not necessarily wrong by default either.
June 20th, 2005 at 10:55 pmIf they don’t have the comprehension required to understand what Al Gore said about the Internet, why do you ask them to understand statements on complicated topics like international law and human rights?
June 20th, 2005 at 11:12 pmSteveS,
These people are neither conservatives, in any sense, nor Republicans in any sense of the word. They bear no resemblance to Eisenhower and he was a Republican, and even Goldwater disowned them before he died, and he was a conservative in every sense of the word.
June 20th, 2005 at 11:19 pmOld USENETers will recognize that Durbin has fallen into the rhetorical trap of violating Godwin’s Law http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Godwin’s_law: “As an online discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Nazis or Hitler approaches one,” which is corrolary to Richard Sexton’s assertion “You can tell when a USENET discussion is getting old when one of the participents (sic) drags out Hitler and the Nazis.”
Dragging Hitler into the discussion is just lazy and, in this context, more than a little stupid, since it just gives the opposition more wet straw with which to create a smoke screen.
June 21st, 2005 at 9:13 amBushies burn their own wet straw regardless.
June 21st, 2005 at 11:00 amDisagreement over Durbin’s remarks come down to two ways of interpreting them – normatively, or positively. A normative translation focuses on what “should be true”. Look at the SteveS comment: “But how can anyone confuse that treatment with torture and disrespect for Humans?” Normatively speaking, Steve is right. America is not Nazi Germany.
Interpreted positively, Durbin was correct. If one were to read the FBI report, without attibution, one would easily assume the abuses were caused by a despotic regime. That is true. Pol Pot tortured. Hitler tortured. Stalin tortured.
And now the US tortures.
The war against Islamofascism is fought on many fronts, and victory will come only when the US is able to convince a billion Muslims that they are better off with Western style freeedoms than 12th century oppressors. Gitmo is not a good place to start.
And that’s how I interpret Durbin’s remarks.
June 21st, 2005 at 12:51 pmDo the Bushketeers question the FBI agent’s claims, or was he a traitor as well?
June 21st, 2005 at 12:59 pmDead on, skid. The rightwing focuses so much energy on how people are talking about these issues, not so much about whether what they’re talking about is true. It’s just like with them blaming Newsweek for the riots in Afghanistan – blame the report, not the actual insult; so too with Amnesty International’s report – attack their language, not the content. It’s about time the rightwingers stop worrying about what we say and start worrying about what they do.
June 21st, 2005 at 2:55 pmGodwin was a nazi. Screw him.
… As long as you continue to tar social democracy with all the crimes of communism, I feel equally entitled to tar the free market with the crimes of slavery, segregation, colonialism and genocide; piss me off and I’ll add fascism and the Nazis.
Greg Erwin
June 21st, 2005 at 3:38 pmOne word for Durbin’s back down and apology today:
SPINELESS
Sorry to say it, but its simply unacceptable. I let him know, you should too.
June 21st, 2005 at 7:57 pmLEAK: Durbin Apology Draft Differs from Final Version
June 23rd, 2005 at 2:16 am