Durbin goes down

Sen. Dick Durbin has caught all kinds of grief for comments supposedly comparing American treatment of prisoners in Guantanamo to actions of Nazis, Soviet gulags, Pol Pot, etc. People have called for an apology, resignation, even charges of treason.

That's crazy talk. Have any of these people read what he actually said? He cited a few examples of prisoner abuse and said that if listeners didn't know otherwise, they would have assumed that he was talking about some evil regime.

Which is true. Or at least it was until the revelations of recent months. If, say, three or four years ago, I had read you an account of people charged with no crime being chained to the floor so long they pissed on themselves, with no food or water, and asked you to identify who did that, you would not have guessed America. That isn't us - or at least it isn't the way we think of ourselves.

That was Durbin's point: not that we are the same as evil regimes but that we have done some things lately that more closely resemble evil regimes than they resemble our own ideals and beliefs.

The fact that Pol Pot, the Nazis and Soviets all did much worse things is irrelevant to Durbin's point. Hitler and Stalin murdered millions, but they also chained people in cells without food or water. It was the sort of banal cruelty we associate with totalitarian states, along with their more horrific acts. Durbin's point wasn't that we are same as them; his point was that we take great pride in being far better than that. And when we do things that sound like something a brutal tyranny might have done, then we'd better straighten up.

To say that's an insult to law-abiding and humane soldiers is simply perverse. And to call it treason is to rob the word of all meaning.