A Better Comparison, Perhaps

Lt. Calley

One of the lessons of the whole Dick Durbin Attack (and apology) is that the mention of Nazis or Stalinists seems to be so inflammatory that the Right Wing Noise Machine finds it easier to do their usual misinterpretation, manipulation or outright misquoting of such matters. Right wingnuts treat such considered comments as if they were an entitlement to ignore the true problem by diverting attention from actually being awol or actually being complicit in torture done in the name of our country. Jon Stewart was wise enough to point this out last week; it's a losing proposition to mention Nazism and your opponent in the same speech, whether it's done by Rick Santorum or Robert Byrd.

It's inconceivable that any one could think that Durbin was universally attacking all of our soldiers. For what reason ? He really didn't say that.If one reads what he said, one would certainly think that he was disgusted that it was our soldiers who were observed mistreating prisoners by our FBI agent. He wasn't even reading his own words. Once again,the actual problem, such torture as chaining up prisoners for 24 hours or more, is ignored in order to attack the messenger. In current parlance, this is ignoring the elephant in the room. So many wingnut commentators seem to be saying that the problem was not that this kind of stuff was going on, but that it was publically reported to such places as Al-Jazeera.

Better to stick to 100% American examples of atrocious behavior, like the My Lai Massacre. When Seymour Hersh reported the My Lai story, it was eventually understood that this incident in no way represented all of our soldiers in Viet Nam, but only an aberrant few. Still, the perpetrators needed to be accountable for their transgressions, as are we all. Their actions disgraced every American.