I had planned to continue, and perhaps complete, my series on The Doctor's Dilemma: Risks, benefits, and liabilities (which started here) but, as often happens, reality intruded.
About 6 weeks ago, I wrote a post, Dangerous Portents, in which I expressed my concerns that the rhetorical excesses of the left, given legitimacy by the MSM (especially the New York Times and its derivatives) and the Democratic Party, would lead to violence.
When your enemies are evil, dangerous fascists who are dedicated to destroying your country, your civil rights, and enslaving and/or killing various innocents, it becomes incumbent on right minded people to act to prevent further horrors. This is the logic of the left, aided and abetted by large parts of the MSM, Academia, and the Democratic Party. While they will accuse the Republicans and Bush of doing exactly what I just described, their logic fails when it can not encompass 9/11, Afghanistan and Iraq elections, 3/11, the Cedar revolution, and so much more, but much of the left is beyond the touch of reason; will violence follow?
Yesterday, Senator Dick Durbin, Democrat from Illinois, took the rhetoric to a new level of irrationality. After describing how an al Qaeda member was subjected to such "tortures" as having his air conditioning turned down to a low temperature, and later turned off so that the room became extremely hot (the horror was compounded by playing loud rap music while the prisoner was chained on the floor, Senator Durbin made the following claim:
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.
I have no doubt that the prisoner was very uncomfortable but to assert that this was torture on the level of the Nazis, or the Gulags, or Pol Pot, is not only wrong, but suggests the speaker has taken leave of his senses. The Jawa Report has some descriptions of real torture, as provided by Saddam Hussein. It is graphic and disturbing, and impossible to confuse with what our people were doing, even at their worst, in Guantanamo or Abu Graib.
It raises concerns and questions:
Durbin, et al, who assert that that Gitmo and Abu Graib have rendered us indistinguishable form Pol Pot, the Nazis and the Soviets, are objectively wrong. There is, in fact, no resemblance of what we are doing in Gitmo to what constitutes actual torture.
If Durbin, et al, actually believe in the literal truth of their statement, then, at best, they have lost the ability to differentiate their own fantasied elaboration of reality and reality. This is to be expected in the fever swamps of DU, but is frightening coming from a United States Senator.
If Durbin, et al, know they are making outrageously exaggerated statements, then they either are overtly opposed to their own country and are willing to risk the death of Americans in Iraq and at home in order to damage an evil administration that has plunged us into a horribly immoral adventure for reasons hidden to most of us, or they are cynically risking the deaths of American military people abroad and innocents in Iraq and elsewhere, in the service of their corrupt needs, for power and narcissistic gratification.
In the former case, their stupidity is dangerous. These statements offer reinforcements to our enemies in the information war, convince the Jihadists they can win if they persist long enough, and give impetus to the more radical elements on the left. Further, the risk of violence increases with every statement that legitimizes the kind of paranoid fantasies that are being supported by such talk.
If the Bush administration is the equivalent of Pol Pot, the Nazis, and the Soviets, all right thinking Americans must oppose the evil, even with violence. In fact, violence against such a state would be a moral necessity.
If they do not believe their own rhetoric, and recognize the hyperbolic nature of their assertions, their opportunism puts people in danger in the same way as above, but with even less justification; it is, if anything, more despicable.
Sadly, the Bush administration, even accepting that they are terribly handicapped by the opposition of the MSM, continues to do a poor job of articulating the connections between the Iraq theater and the over all war on Islamic fascism, though there are some signs that they are beginning to mobilize their resources.
It remains a remarkable testament to our country that we can tolerate this kind of dangerous and violent nonsense in the service of freedom, but the air is charged and physical violence is not far from the surface.
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