Dastardly Dick Roundup Pt II

Jed Babbin is in a horserace with Mark Steyn for best commentary on this issue:

As if to compensate for having sent us Abraham Lincoln and Everett Dirksen, the state of Illinois has inflicted us with Richard Durbin. When last we viewed this otherwise insignificant man, he was one of three Democratic senators who were the subject of a CIA request to the Justice Department for a criminal investigation into their intentional leaking some of our nation's most closely kept secrets. That request has lain dormant for more than six months in large part because alleged Senate majority leader, Sen. Bill Frist, has shown no interest in it. Now Durbin has provided a redundant proof of his unfitness for office.

Last Tuesday, at the end of a characteristically forgettable speech, Durbin referred to an FBI memo alleging harsh treatment of one of the terrorists being held at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. After reading part of the memo, Durbin said, "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. This was the action of Americans in the treatment of their prisoners."

We might never have heard about Durbin's remarks were it not for my pal Laura Ingraham and her nearly-omniscient producer, Lee Habeeb, who caught Durbin in the act and played the audio on Laura's radio show last Wednesday before anyone else reported it. (Actually, there is a question about who reported it first. A senior Defense Department official said Thursday that al-Jazeera had it five minutes after Durbin spoke. I did not attempt to confirm this with Mr. Jihad Ballout, al-Jazeera's press officer. And no, I'm not making his name up.) Durbin and the rest of the hyperlibs are making a commonplace of utterly false accusations of crimes against humanity against brave, dedicated Americans who are defending this nation.

Let's ignore the fact that the FBI memo Durbin read from is comprised of unproven allegations which are now the subject of an ongoing investigation. Durbin doesn't care about the truth of the allegations. He wanted to attract attention, and he succeeded to a degree he never envisioned.

We executed Nazi and Japanese war criminals for murdering millions, and Israel hung Adolf Eichmann after a long trial and his conviction of participating in the Nazis murder of millions. Pol Pot's actions in Cambodia planned and murdered between 1.5 and 3 million. No one knows how many millions were murdered by beating, starvation, and freezing in the Gulags, but the best estimates say the Soviets murdered at least 20 million people. How many have died at Guantanamo Bay, Sen. Durbin? The answer is zero.


IF YOU BELIEVE THE DEANOCRATS and their media pals, we're holding people incommunicado, in a legal limbo, where innocents are beaten, starved, and tortured, that America is an international outlaw, that Gitmo is OBL's best recruiting tool, that we're violating the Geneva Conventions, and that all the Islamic fascisti would join with us to sing Kumbaya if only we closed Gitmo. Enough. You won't get your teens to read all three volumes of Solzhenitsyn's The Gulag Archipelago. But you may, at least, be able to get them to read from here to the bottom of this article.

We're holding people there incommunicado? According to 1st Lt. Wade Brown, the chief mail man at Gitmo, every detainee at Gitmo, regardless of his conduct, is allowed mail privileges unless he can't be trusted with a pen because he's threatened to harm himself. Lt. Brown, in a sworn declaration dated March 17, 2005, said that from September 2004 through February 2005, 14,000 pieces of mail were sent or received by detainees at Gitmo.

Legal limbo? Some 800 suspected terrorists have, so far, been incarcerated at Gitmo. All of them have had their cases reviewed by military commissions. About 235 have been released, 61 are today awaiting release or transfer, and about 520 remain, having been given all the due process to which they are entitled by U.S. and international law, including the Geneva Conventions. They are enemy combatants. We are entitled to hold them until the war is over whether it's tomorrow or in 2525.

Don't confuse Dick or the Democrats with the facts. They simply want a stick to beat America with for having the temerity to elect Dubya twice, War on Terror be damned.

Hugh Hewitt isn't willing to let the MSM and their Democrat drinking buddies sweep Durbin's anti-Americanism under the rug:

Durbin's original remarks on Tuesday, June 14, and his subsequent commentary and statements tell us a great deal about the strategy and mindset of the Democratic party as we approach the fourth anniversary of the war's beginning. I am collecting all those early statements here, in the

order they appeared, for the purpose of showing exactly what it was that Durbin set out to do and how, even after a volcano of condemnation erupted around him, he clung to his core message. A debate over a censure resolution will oblige both parties to draw lines about Durbin's remarks, and especially about the character and purpose of the United States armed services.

The Blogfather then proceeds to amply demonstrate that Durbin's contents were not only not taken out of context---they WERE the context for a left-wing hate-America rant remarkable solely for the fact that it was delivered in the Senate and not at some DNC fundraiser judiciously ignored by the MSM.

Read the whole thing, and don't worry---you don't need to read another word about Durbin today. Hugh's truly said it all.