Steyn on Dickie Durban

It's all good:

Again, the more one hears the specifics of the “insensitivity� of the American regime at Guantanamo, the more many of us reckon we’re being way too sensitive. For example, camp guards are under instructions to handle copies of the Koran only when wearing gloves. The reason for this is that the detainees regard infidels as “unclean�. Fair enough, each to his own. But it’s one thing for the Islamists to think infidels are unclean, quite another for the infidels to agree with them. Far from being tortured, the prisoners are being handled literally with kid gloves (or simulated kid-effect gloves). The US military hand each jihadi his complimentary copy of the Koran as delicately as white-gloved butlers bringing His Lordship The Times of London. When I bought a Koran to bone up on Islam a couple of days after 9/11, I didn’t wear gloves to the bookstore. If that’s “disrespectful� to Muslims, tough. You should have thought about that before you allowed your holy book to become the central motivation for global jihad.

...

Judging from the way he’s dug himself in, Dick Durbin, the Number Two Democrat in the US Senate, genuinely believes Gitmo is analogous to Belsen, the gulags and the killing fields. But he crossed a line, from anti-Bush to anti-American, and most Americans have no interest in following him down that path.You can’t claim (as Democrats do, incessantly) to “support our troops� and then dump them in the same category as the Nazis and the Khmer Rouge. In the hermetically sealed echo chamber between the Dem leadership, the mainstream US media, Hollywood, Ivy League “intellectuals� and European sophisticates, the gulag cracks are utterly unexceptional. But, for a political party that keeps losing elections because it has less and less appeal outside a few coastal enclaves, Durbin’s remarks are devastating. The Democrats flopped in 2002 and 2004 because they were seen as incoherent on national security issues. Explicitly branding themselves as the “terrorists’ rights� party is unlikely to improve their chances for 2006.

Dave Chappelle has a funny bit concerning the few times that racism works in black men's favor (serendipitidously enough, the bit has to do with terrorism).

Similarly, media bias sometimes works in conservatives' favor, and when it does, as Chappelle says, it's delicious.

Jonah Goldberg pointed out how liberal media bias hurts liberals: In a nutshell, they just don't see these shit-storms coming. Conservatives almost always see these shit-storms coming, because we know every false-footing (yeah, I know the French term, but fuck 'em) will be played up on page one of the New York Times. So we're naturally hesitant and paranoid and a little afraid of public reaction (or, rather, media attempts to drive public reaction).

Unless of course the conservative in question is a total tool like Trent Lott or Jerry Falwell.

But liberals get caught an awful lot with their little pink dinks poking out of their zippers, because the reinforcement from their cocooned liberal social circles and the New York Times editorial page tells them You're not only right and brave to do this, but you'll be rewarded handsomely in political terms.

They see little else but a very skewed sample of "American opinion." I'm sure Dick Durbin was mouthing off about this at a DC cocktail party a few weeks ago, and he got nothing but "Huzzah!'s" from his dopey liberal buddies. Someone should have the guts to say that on the Senate floor, someone told him, who, just guessing, was probably a cute 20-year-old intern at The Washington Prospect.

And so, partly to impress his little cocktail party chickadee, he decided he'd compare the very minor physical coercion at Gitmo to Pol Pot's killing fields and Hitler's industrialized genocide.

And then he found out something that should have been obvious had his mind not been clouded by bedding an intern: This was a colossally stupid, dangerous, anti-American, and politically disastrous thing to say.

The stupid son of a bitch-- and he IS stupid, of course -- never saw this coming. He thought himself "brave" in making these remarks, but only in that rather odd sense of "bravery" in which he'd actually be rewarded for his "risk." It didn't occur to him he was about to bring himself and his party into general disrepute.

And so it goes. The liberal media has once again screwed one of their own by not accurately reporting the public temperament and mood. Dick Durbin trusted the liberal media, and is only now finding out that, gee willickers, maybe the American people aren't quite as hopped-up about "abuses" at Gitmo as the left-leaning folks at Amnesty International are.

As Styen (and everyone else) is remarking: After Clinton finally helped shed the Democrats' long reputation as the party of criminals' rights, a new Confederacy of Dunces is hell-bent on establishing them as the Hug a Terrorist party.

Congratulations-- you just endeared yourself to the NYT's Gail Collins. And alienated the majority of voters in all of the swing states you'll need to win in 2008.

posted by Ace at 03:34 PM

| Access Comments