Durbin Must Go

I believe Comrade Durbin should step down, actually better yet he should be recalled. The people from Illinois should demand a recall of this piece of trash.

Do I think this will happen…nope. Obviously there are some real winners in Illinois who elected this piece of crap. He is now calling your husbands & fathers, wives & mothers, your sisters and brothers who serve in our military Nazis…comparing them to Stalin’s and Pol Pot’s henchmen.

He needs to go NOW!

Add this to his idiocy…he tries to calm everything down by issuing a non-apology:

Sen. Dick Durbin, D-Ill., said Friday that he regretted any misunderstandings caused by his comments earlier this week comparing American interrogators at Guantanamo Bay to Nazis. The White House, Senate Republicans and others had called for an apology after Durbin’s comments Tuesday. …

On Friday, Durbin tried to clarify the issue. “My statement in the Senate was critical of the policies of this Administration, which add to the risk our soldiers face,” he said in a statement released Friday afternoon. “I have learned from my statement that historical parallels can be misused and misunderstood. I sincerely regret if what I said caused anyone to misunderstand my true feelings: Our soldiers around the world and their families at home deserve our respect, admiration and total support.”

So he doesn’t retract anything he said, just tells us that we are all too stupid to understand what he meant.

Then on top of this he tell’s a Chicago radio station this: (h/t Hugh Hewitt)

Q. No regrets on the statements you made?

Durbin: No, I don’t, and I’ll tell you why. I went to the floor and read a memo from the FBI. This isn’t something I made up.

So there you have it. A non-apology preceded by a statement that he meant every word and was not sorry for his statement.

The Boston Herald is getting it right tho:

The second highest ranking Democrat in the Senate has compared American servicemen and women to Nazis on the floor of that body. Has political debate sunk so low that a comment that hideous can be made by Sen. Richard Durbin (D-Ill.) without repercussions?

Sen. Trent Lott (R-Miss.) lost his leadership position for the lesser if still odious offense of praising Strom Thurmond’s presidential campaign which had taken place decades earlier.

When Amnesty International makes such comparisons it irreversibly damages its credibility. When a U.S. senator does so, he damages the institution and the country he serves.

Durbin must go.

At least the Republican leadership is reacting:

Durbin’s statements were made in reaction to a letter House Republicans sent House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi Friday asking her to publicly condemn his comments from earlier in the week.

“Does the speech made by Senator Durbin also reflect your views as the House Democratic Leader? If not, we respectfully request that you publicly renounce Senator Durbin’s comments. These sorts of irresponsible comments send the wrong message to our soldiers,” stated the letter signed by House Speaker J. Dennis Hastert, House Majority Leader Tom DeLay and three other GOP leaders.

…

Under Pol Pot’s regime, 1.5 million died in death camps and another 200,000 so-called “enemies of the state” were executed. The Nazis killed 6 million Jews and forced hundreds of thousands into slave labor. The USSR’s Joseph Stalin (search) sent 25 million people to labor camps where many were worked to death.

Republicans and Bush administration officials called the comparison between those horrors and the U.S. prison camp’s guards “reprehensible” and “deplorable.”

“Clearly, that’s over the top. That is not what is happening at Guantanamo Bay. What is happening at Guantanamo Bay is we’re trying to treat people humanely, recognizing that these are terrorists,” said Sen. John Cornyn, R-Texas.

“Senator Durbin’s statements are deplorable. He should ask for forgiveness, forgiveness from our troops, from their families and all of us who are trying to win this War on Terror,” said Sen. George Allen, R-Va.

To compare treatment by guards at Guantanamo Bay to “concentration camps and Pol Pot’s regime is simply reprehensible,” White House spokesman Scott McClellan said. “I just think those remarks are reprehensible and they are a real disservice to our men and women in uniform. Our men and women in uniform go out of their way to treat detainees humanely, and they go out of their way to uphold the values and the laws we hold so dear to our country.

“When you talk about the gulags and the concentration camps and Pol Pot’s regime, millions of people, innocent people were killed by those regimes,” he said.

Warner, chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, said he had inquired as to whether the FBI’s descriptions are true.

“I was trained as a lawyer, many years as a prosecutor dealt with the bureau, have the highest respect. But I do not accept at face value everything they put down on paper until I make certain it can be corroborated and substantiated.

“And for you to come to the floor with just that fragment of a report and then unleash the words ‘the Nazis,’ unleash the word ‘gulag,’ unleash ‘Pol Pot,’ I don’t know how many remember that chapter, it seems to me that was a grievous error in judgment and leaves open to the press of the world to take those three extraordinary chapters in world history and try to intertwine it with what has taken place, allegedly, at Guantanamo,” Warner said.

The military operates under strict guidelines that are widely distributed. Only mild non-injurious physical contact is allowed, such as light pushing. Sleep deprivation is used along with stress positions, but they are limited in time.

One knowledgeable official familiar with the memo cited by Durbin as well as other memos said the FBI agent made no such allegation and that the memo described only someone chained to the floor. Anything beyond that is simply an interpretation, the official said.

Catch that last paragraph?

Want a real comparison between Stalin, Pol Pot and the US? (via One Hand Clapping)

The Soviet Union appears the greatest megamurderer of all, apparently killing near 61,000,000 people. Stalin himself is responsible for almost 43,000,000 of these. Most of the deaths, perhaps around 39,000,000 are due to lethal forced labor in gulag and transit thereto. Communist China up to 1987, but mainly from 1949 through the cultural revolution, which alone may have seen over 1,000,000 murdered, is the second worst megamurderer. Then there are the lesser megamurderers, such as North Korea and Tito?s Yugoslavia.

Obviously the population that is available to kill will make a big difference in the total democide, and thus the annual percentage rate of democide is revealing. By far, the most deadly of all communist countries and, indeed, in this century by far, has been Cambodia under the Khmer Rouge. Pol Pot and his crew likely killed some 2,000,000 Cambodians from April 1975 through December 1978 out of a population of around 7,000,000. This is an annual rate of over 8 percent of the population murdered, or odds of an average Cambodian surviving Pol Pot?s rule of slightly over just over 2 to 1.

In sum the communist probably have murdered something like 110,000,000, or near two-thirds of all those killed by all governments, quasi-governments, and guerrillas from 1900 to 1987. Of course, the world total itself it shocking. It is several times the 38,000,000 battle-dead that have been killed in all this century?s international and domestic wars. Yet the probable number of murders by the Soviet Union alone?one communist country? well surpasses this cost of war. And those murders of communist China almost equal it.

Donald then goes on to cite Yale University about one story of Pol Pot’s regime:

Duch, head of the Tuol Sleng prison complex, was a former schoolteacher named Kang Kech Eav.

Duch oversaw a precise department of death. His guards dutifully photographed the prisoners upon arrival and photgraphed them at or near death, whether their throats were slit, their bodies otherwise mutilated, or so thin from torture and near starvation that they were beyond recognition. The photographs were part of the files to prove the enemies of the state had been killed. Duch even set aside specific days for killing various types of prisoners: one day the wives of ?enemies?; another day the children; a different day, factory workers.?

Yeah, the treatment of prisoners at Gitmo and during those two regimes are sooooo similar.

What could cause those on the left to think like this? Were they abused as children? Dropped on their heads maybe? Roger Simon points to a comment made on his blog that might explain it:

The fundamental psychological mechanism at work in paranoia is “projection”.

Since those on the left know themselves to be more caring and loving of their fellow man than those of us who reside closer to reality, they are unable to tolerate their own hatred and must deny it. It is then projected onto others (ie, “I don’t hate you, but you are hateful to me.”) This, in turn, then justifies their rage as a reaction to our (fantasied) attacks on them. It is as if the left (which sadly, now includes the core of the Democratic party and the MSM) has been so enraged by their rejection by the country (which has been going on now for 20 years), that they first deny it (the election was stolen), justify their innate goodness by projecting the hate onto the “Republicans”, invent fantasies of horrors perpetrated by our governemnt and military (Abu Graib, Gitmo) and then can offer aid and comfort to our enemies with a clear conscience. (Senator Durban)

As I have warned in the past, this kind of paranoia is a prescription for violence: If the Bush administration is the equivalent of Pol Pot, the Nazis, and the Soviets, all right thinking Americans must oppose the evil, even with violence. In fact, violence against such a state would be a moral necessity.

It is worrisome.

And what will be the end result of all this? Hopefully a Senator will lose his job. I know one thing tho, Gitmo isn’t shutting down:

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – A Halliburton Company unit will build a new US$30 million (A$39 million) detention facility and security fence at the US naval base at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, where the United States is holding about 520 foreign terrorism suspects, the Defence Department has announced.

The announcement comes the same week that Vice President Dick Cheney and Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld defended the jail after US lawmakers said it had created an image problem for the United States.

Cheney was chief executive officer of Halliburton from 1995 through August 2000.

Critics have decried the indefinite detention of Guantanamo detainees, whom the United States has denied rights accorded under the Geneva Conventions to prisoners of war. The prison was called “the gulag of our times” in a recent Amnesty International report.

An air-conditioned two-story prison, known as Detention Camp Number 6, will be built at Guantanamo to house 220 men. It will include exercise areas, medical and dental spaces as well as a security control room, the contract announcement said.

The contract announcement did not specify whether the new prison would also hold foreign terror suspects.

Under the deal with the Norfolk, Virginia-based US Naval Facilities Engineering Command, Atlantic, the work is to be wrapped up by July 2006. It is part of a larger contract that could be worth up to $500 million if all options are exercised, the Defence Department said.

The project is to be carried out by Halliburton subsidiary Kellogg Brown & Root Services of Arlington, Virginia. It includes site work, heating ventilation and air conditioning, plumbing and electrical work, the Pentagon said.

The first prisoners arrived at the prison camp in January 2002 after the September 11, 2001, hijacked airliner attacks on New York and the Pentagon.

The Pentagon has said about 520 detainees from more than 40 countries are being held at the prison, without giving a precise figure.

Rumsfeld said on Tuesday US taxpayers had spend more than $100 million on construction costs and no other facility could replace it.

Finally I have two things. Go to The Campaign Store and pick up a “I Love Gitmo” bumper sticker and start calling Comrade Durban:

Phone – Washington: (202)224-2152

Phone – Chicago: (312)353-4952

E-mail: dick@durbin.senate.gov

That is all.

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