Once again, give Mark Steyn credit for combining clarity and wit better than anyone else, this time on Dick Durbin's inanity:
But give Durbin credit. Every third-rate hack on every European newspaper can do the Americans-are-Nazis schtick. Amnesty International has already declared Guantanamo the "gulag of our times." But I do believe the senator is the first to compare the U.S. armed forces with the blood-drenched thugs of Pol Pot's Khmer Rouge. Way to go, senator! If you had a dime for every crackpot Web site that takes up your thoughtful historical comparison, you'd be able to retire to the Caribbean and spend the rest of your days torturing yourself with hot weather and loud music, as well as inappropriately provocative women and insufficient choice of hors d'oeuvres and all the other shameful atrocities committed at Guantanamo.Just for the record, some 15 million to 30 million Soviets died in the gulag; some 6 million Jews died in the Nazi camps; some 2 million Cambodians -- one third of the population -- died in the killing fields. Nobody's died in Gitmo, not even from having Christina Aguilera played to them excessively loudly. The comparison is deranged, and deeply insulting not just to the U.S. military but to the millions of relatives of those dead Russians, Jews and Cambodians, who, unlike Durbin, know what real atrocities are. Had Durbin said, "Why, these atrocities are so terrible you would almost believe it was an account of the activities of my distinguished colleague Robert C. Byrd's fellow Klansmen," that would have been a little closer to the ballpark but still way out.
One measure of a civilized society is that words mean something: "Soviet" and "Nazi" and "Pol Pot" cannot equate to Guantanamo unless you've become utterly unmoored from reality. Spot the odd one out: 1) mass starvation; 2) gas chambers; 3) mountains of skulls; 4) lousy infidel pop music turned up to full volume. One of these is not the same as the others, and Durbin doesn't have the excuse that he's some airhead celeb or an Ivy League professor. He's the second-ranking Democrat on the Senate Judiciary Committee. Don't they have an insanity clause?
What about 3rd rate hack Senate Majority leaders? Or is it only okay to make the Nazi comparison when referring to state governments or "activist" judges? Maybe the all-powerful Right would be so kind as to delineate for us the difference between acceptable and unacceptable uses of "The Nazi Card."
Give me a break. Comparing everything but the kitchen sink to Nazi Germany has become a tired political cliche used constantly on both sides of the aisle.
Posted by: Al at June 20, 2005 09:18 AMI missed the Frist statement to which you refer. Maybe you could cite it for me. You're right, both sides are guilty of this at times. And sometimes, as with Saddam or Milosevic or Mugabe, the comparison is apt. But I don't see how any of that makes anything Steyn is saying less appropriate.
Posted by: dan at June 20, 2005 09:46 AMMy mistake. I was confusing Frist's *ahem* retraction about his Schiavo statements with Robert George and Michael Savage's comparisons on the case. Rick Santorum was the senator who compared Democrats to Hitler regarding filibusters.
The question is the same. Do we need a book of etiquette regarding proper usage of Nazi comparisons? Santorum's conduct is somehow acceptable because Al-Jazeera won't run with it?
If Durbin is responsible for bloggers taking his words out of context, will the religious right take accountability for the next abortion clinic bombing in the name of the so-called "Culture of Life?"
Durbin's remarks were inarguably stupid ONLY for their usage of the comparison to Nazis, Khmer Rouge and Soviets. His point remains a valid one and the furor over this issue seems silly in light of the bipartisan overuse of such comparisons.
Steyn's article pokes fun at the assumption that the only torture the prisoners received was to have the temperature raised or lowered in their cells, and the loud music. Boo hoo. He conveniently left out Durbin's other comments about prisoners found laying in their own excrement after having been abandonded for 24 hours tied to chairs, ripping their own hair out, etc. I assume that would have diminished the wittiness and clarity of his post.
I understand the death toll at Gitmo matches exactly the body count from the Democrats' Neo-Nazi filibuster tactics.
Posted by: Al at June 21, 2005 01:01 PMI replied to you at some length in a private email, but wanted to add that I'd be interested to see the Santorum statement. The only Senator I heard of who used a Hitler reference relative to the filibuster was Robert "Sheets" Byrd (D-WV) who likened GOP-proposed filibuster reform to Hitler's rise to power. I'll try to find a link to that.
Posted by: dan at June 22, 2005 02:16 AMNot sure how the links work here, but I'm betting the old cut and paste still does nicely.
Al
Posted by: Al at June 22, 2005 04:19 PMThanks, Al. I don't often agree with Jonathan Chait, but he's on the mark here. I appreciate you digging for that.
Surely you've heard of Godwin's Law, the old USENET rule of Nazi analogies. Or not.
Posted by: dan at June 23, 2005 01:00 AMI hadn't heard of it in that context until recently. We did have a similar rule on the debate team back in the day. I'm not sure what we called it then.
Posted by: Al at June 24, 2005 08:04 AM