Durbin has set a lot of people up in arms with his ridiculous comparison of Americans to Nazis, Pol Pot, etc. It appears the beating that he deserves, and those dems who did not distance themselves in time, will continue for a while.

John Podhoretz in the NY Post is livid and clear:

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.

Investors Business Daily (via Yahoo) reminds Durbin that these terrorists are dangerous, and why we are doing this in the first place:

Perhaps Durbin should ask Luis Pepe and his family. As columnist Jonah Goldberg has reported, Pepe was a guard at a high security federal jail in lower Manhattan where Mamdouh Mahmud Salim, a reputed top lieutenant of Osama bin Laden, was being held.

On Nov. 1, 2000, Salim plunged a sharpened comb into Pepe’s left eye and three inches into his brain, leaving him with severe brain damage, crippling disabilities and endless surgeries. As Salim and two other terrorists awaiting trial tried to escape, they took the time to paint a Christian cross on Pepe’s torso using his own blood.

Al-Qahtani is the so-called 20th hijacker of 9-11. Among the other “torture” techniques said to have been used in his interrogation is showing him pictures of the burning towers, the incinerated bodies and the deaths of 2,973 Americans.

It might not be a bad idea if Sen. Durbin and his brethren were forced to look at them again as well.

The Northwest Herald tries to remind Durbin he is not a KOS Kid or a DU Moonbat but a US Senator (but the distinctions are becoming totally invisible now) and suggest he should resign his leadership role as Lott did:

But comparing U.S. interrogators with Nazis, Soviets and Pol Pot crosses any imaginable line of respect for the U.S. armed forces and America itself. It is utterly reprehensible.

Durbin is not some half-cocked cable talk-show screamer but a member of the Senate – its second-ranking Democrat. When a U.S. senator speaks, his or her words can travel around the world. And they can embarrass and enrage Americans.

Durbin stands by his remarks – foolishly.
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The same goes for Durbin. A heartfelt apology to the armed services and the American people would be a start. Resigning his post as assistant minority leader would put action behind his words.

UPDATE:

Michelle Malkin has a lot more links to a lot more angry people, check it out.

Ed Morrissey finds a comparison between an Illinois jail and GITMO which is quite enlightening. To add to this I might add an observation my 20 year old daughter made about violent patients in a mental health institution and the fact that they too can be tied down for long periods, and roughly handlled. I won’t even go into the shock therapy.

bRight & Early has another great round up of commentary from the blogosphere.

Lori Byrd at Polipundit is starting to ask the real important question, how is this playing with our enemies. As shown below it is a pure propoganda gold mine. If the left thought their lame rumors about Koran flushings where a recruitment boon for terrorists, they should think about what Durbin just did.

END UPDATE

I could google Durbin all day it seems. But why is this so important, its just some babbling pol, right?

Well, this is why a Senator cannot act like some out of work college kid playing hero to the world by protesting the establishment. This is why senators need restraint and balance, and need to think beyond partisan greed:

However, Senator Durbin’s remarks do break significant positive ground on some points:

1. A forthright acknowledgement by Senator Durbin that Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib are not “abuses”, but torture:

“I believe the torture techniques that have been used at Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo and other places fall into that same category.”

2. An admission of Congressional impotence – the concentration camps are so secret that even the supine US Congress doesn’t know where they are all located:

“…the administration has detained thousands of individuals in secret detention centers all around the world, some of them unknown to Members of Congress. While it is the most well-known, Guantanamo Bay is only one of them.”

3. An implicit admission of US hypocrisy in issuing its annual “human rights report”:

“The United States, which each year issues a human rights report, holding the world accountable for outrageous conduct, is engaged in the same outrageous conduct when it comes to these prisoners.”

4. Writing about the thousands of American Japanese who were imprisoned in US concentration camps during World War II, Durbin mentions:

“It took almost 40 years for us to acknowledge that we were wrong, to admit that these people should never have been imprisoned. It was a shameful period in American history and one that very few, if any, try to defend today.”

Someone should inform Senator Durbin that support for the World War II concentration camps for Japanese citizens is thoroughly embedded in the antichrist Bush regime.

Thanks Dick.