Friday, June 17, 2005

John Podhoretz: Dick Durbin Goes 'Over the Line'

OVER THE LINE
The New York Post

June 17, 2005 -- For years, Democratic politicians have reacted with spitting, consuming rage at the accusation that they are reflexively anti-military. That anger has, at times, been justified, as the charge has been thrown around too cavalierly. But Democratic anger has also been an effective tool because it puts Republicans on the spot, and usually Republicans back off when confronted.

You don't hear Republican politicians throwing around the "anti-military" charge these days with the abandon that, say, Democrats hurl the charge that Republicans are "anti-poor."

Well, as the White House finally recognized yesterday, it's time to take the gloves off. It's time for Republican politicians to put Democratic politicians on the spot.

On Wednesday, the second highest-ranking Democrat in the U.S. Senate compared American soldiers engaged in the punishing and difficult task of interrogating known terrorists to Nazis.

Sen. Dick Durbin isn't some loudmouth caller to Air America Radio or some psycho poster on loony-Left Web sites like democraticunderground.com. He is a machine-cog pol from the state of Illinois. And he's a big, big cheese.

After reading an e-mail from an FBI agent who complained that prisoners at Guantanamo Bay were subjected to extremes of heat and cold — and to loud rap music — Durbin went on to say: "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. Sadly, that is not the case."

There was general outrage when Amnesty International made the disgusting comparison of Gitmo to Stalin's gulag. A million of the approximately 26 million incarcerated in the Gulag actually died from it — which makes analogizing it to a prison facility holding, at most, 750 people an act of intellectual barbarity.

But being merely intellectually barbarous was evidently small beer for Dick Durbin, whose comfort in using genocides as cheap rhetorical devices earns him the rare position of being intellectually genocidal.

No, Stalin wasn't enough for our Dickie. He had to add on the Nazis (concentration camp death toll: 7 million) and the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia (total death toll: 2 million). Their victims were innocents. Those incarcerated at Gitmo, it must be said again and again and again, were taken on the battlefield in Afghanistan or in proximity to it.

And who gets the blame from Durbin? "This was the action of Americans in the treatment of their prisoners," said Durbin. Yes, it was. Those Americans happen to be enlistees in the U.S. military. They are, in other words, soldiers or sailors or airmen or Marines, under the command of other military officials.

Now, at this point in a column on this subject, it's usually the time for the standard disclaimer that goes something like this: Yes, there can be bad apples in the American military. Yes, our techniques have been controversial and deserve serious debate. Yes, torture is bad. Yes, yes, yes.

No, no, no. Not this time. Dick Durbin has slandered the American military. He has slandered his country. He has defiled truth and he has spat on reason. He has given aid and comfort to all those who seek to use America's tough stance in the War on Terror as a recruiting tool for anti-Americanism.

He is the Senate's Democratic whip: a leader of his party by any stretch of the imagination. If he remains a leader of his party, his party deserves to be judged by his words — by his anti-military, anti-American words.

Judged, and held to account.

E-mail: podhoretz@nypost.com

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