Confederacy of Dunce Editors

Fisking a Star-Tribune editorial is a lot like watching professional wrestling. The lines are all basically the same, whoever says them and whatever they're said about. One the battle starts, you pretty much see the same moves, the same grimaces, the same throws and tackles and jumps off the turnbuckle every time.

The difference is with wrestling, you know it's fake. With the Strib, you know someone actually believes it.

In a portfolio of fantasy-based madness, today's editorial stands out.

Remember as you read it; They actually believe that what they're writing is legit, correct, accurate, and above all morally on-the-beam.

Sen. Dick Durbin, D-Ill., set off a firestorm last week when he compared U.S. treatment of prisoners at Guantanamo to practices employed by Nazis, Soviets, Pol Pot and their ilk. His remarks were condemned by the White House, the Pentagon, the Christian Coalition, the Veterans of Foreign Wars, Newt Gingrich (who called for his censure by the Senate) and by the entire right side of the talk radio/television/blog world. The heat got so bad that, late in the week, Durbin apologized if his remarks had been "misunderstood." They weren't, and Durbin should not have apologized.

That's right. In the Strib's world, it's a fair comparison.

It may be the only one they make in the whole piece, as we see in the next graf:

Instead, the senator should have hit back hard, just as the Amnesty International did when its comparison of Guantanamo to the Soviet gulag was attacked.

The Amnesty report, as scurrilous and inaccurate as it was, though, made the "Gulag" reference based on the scattered nature of the camps, and their secrecy. It was a specious comparison, but at least they were shooting for a basis in fact.

By caving in, Durbin did just what the orchestrated right-wing smear effort required to succeed: It made him the story rather than focusing further attention on the outrageous violations of international law and human rights being perpetrated in Guantanamo and elsewhere in the name of the American people.

For starters: "Orchestrated" attack?

Please, Strib editors; show us orchestration. Because what I - a simple blogger and hobby radio host - read and heard was thousands of voices lifted in outrage at a slander. That they rose together should make you think; that you concluded it couldn't happen without "orchestration" proves you didn't.

The comments that were criticized came late in a long, thoughtful speech on the Senate floor in which Durbin reflected on the United States' obligation to be better than reprehensible regimes of the past...Durbin was spot on in his assessment of Guantanamo. That's why he was so roundly attacked. He told the truth. And his message is of vital importance; the United States is better than this.

No. It was "the United States is this, right now".

The issue of whether Durbin's rhetoric crossed a line is small potatoes compared with the undeniable truth that American treatment of its prisoners has crossed many, many lines -- of morality, of international law, of practical benefit.

But instead of discussing what goes on at Guantanamo, Abu Ghraib and other prison camps, the right would prefer to get into a senseless argument about whether "we" are better than the Nazis or Saddam Hussein or the Soviets or Pol Pot or whomever a critic of Guantanamo might raise as a comparison.

Actually, this member of "the right" would rather discuss:

• the Strib's conception of the laws involved; the "detainees" are not criminals. Neither are they prisoners of war; they are terrorists, mostly not natives of the countries in which they were captured, operating on behalf of a non-national body; they have no standing under the Geneva Convention; they can, and perhaps should, be given drumhead courts-martial, lined up and shot, in accordance with hundreds of years of Western legal tradition.
• exactly how these people are treated - better, in large part, than inmates in American prisons. Where are the gangs? The shower-room rapes? The endless, constant, tacitly-tolerated physical abuse that accompanies so many of our own inmates?
• Exactly what "rights does the Strib think these people, in their legal status, should have?

The Strib continues:

It's a tactic the group running Washington now has used again and again: They're quite deliberately changing the subject -- from Guantanamo to words spoken on the Senate floor.

It's not too late, as Durbin said of Bush in his speech: The senator should stop apologizing and keep up the criticism of the hellhole America's military has created at Guantanamo. He has no reason to be defensive; he's telling the truth. It's a truth Americans need to hear, and its tellers must resist intimidation.

On the one hand, poppycock; he's delivering what will in all likelihood be finally determined to be a sensationalist, hysterical message of dubious accuracy that invokes images that, in our civilization, should be inviolate from casual political abuse; the images of Auschwitz, of the Lyubyanka, of the killing fields and the Czarny Maria and the Einsatztruppen, instruments of death for tens of millions of innocents...

...in defense of five hundred thugs, mercenaries and terrorists who are as a rule treated with vastly more social, religious and legal deference than their kind has ever received, anywhere at any time in history.

If you have a quibble with how these people are treated, then by all means bring it up. But to compare the treatment the detainees allegedly received, even if every word is true, with what befell the Jews, the Volgadeutsch, the Kulaks, and the tens of millions of innocents that crossed the world's most monstrous dictators is beyond the pale of moral repugnancy.

On the other; yeah, Dick Durbin. Yes, Strib. Keep it going. Don't apologize. Fly your morally-depraved freak flag high and proud. It's a window into your institutional soul - and the more the people see, the sicker they should get.

Posted by Mitch at June 21, 2005 06:55 PM | TrackBack