In this story you can read how Durbin tearfully apoligized for his comments last week.
Durbin said,“I made reference to Nazis, to Soviets, and other repressive regimes. Mr. President, I’ve come to understand that’s a very poor choice of words.”
A poor choice of words. You know he could have said this last week and I would have been fine with it. I mean all of us have said foolish things in a moment of passion.
But where does that leave those who supported Durbin in this thread?
You guys could have complained about Abu Ghraib, Gitmo, and our prisons in Afghanistan. You could have condemned, if you desired, the treatment of prisoners. You could have done that AND said Durbin was out of line.
But you are so rabidly anti-Bush that you must, MUST , side with anyone who is giving him any measure of grief.
So now that Durbin has admitted that his words were poorly chosen, can you? Or are you still going to defend a position that the good Senator himself abandoned today?
Oh… he abandoned the position, most likely out of political necessity, so it’s false. I’m glad you’ve cleared that up for us. :rolleyes:
I propose that in the future we merely liken the abuse our country hands out to the Mongols. Nobody’s touchy about the mongols.
“The things you see in Gitmo, why, if I didn’t tell you that it was Americans doing it, you’d think it was some group of barbarians like the Huns! Or the Mongols!”
Nope. If Durbin had to recant a bit beacase of the lying distortions of the pro-torture right, that’s his business. If you want to mistreat prisoners in perpetuity, that’s my business. Durbin’s words do nothing to decrease the scumminess of the administration’s policy.
He did not apologize for calling attention to Gitmo. Not at all. Adn I don’t think he should.
He simply apologized for the use of HitStalPot. He realized it was a poor use of words and was sorry for that.
Finn I never said anything was false. I simply said he seems to have come to the logical conclusion that you can oppose Gitmo’s treatment of prisoners AND think that the analogy he drew was bad.
Why can you guys not see that? Why can’t you hold those 2 positions at the same time?
Well Durbin recanted because his words were poorly chosen. Unless you want to put words in his mouth, that is the reason. He made a comment that did not serve his position well and offended a LARGE portion of the electorate.
Th treatment of those at Gitmo is a concern to all Americans. I grant you that. Why can you not have that concern and realize that Durbin’s original remarks weer poorly drawn?
see, the problem is that folks generally can’t recall a regime where all they did wrong was invade another country or two, torture prisoners and stuff. so it’s like a tough thing to find a comparision.
I assumed your point was logicaly coherent. Let me ask you this, if his position isn’t false, why the fuck should we back away from it?
So, wait, his statement was false? Or no?
And simply for the record, since I can’t tell if you’re deliberately mischaracterizing his statements or not… he didn’t draw an analogy. He didn’t say our treatment was like what the Nazis did. He merely said that if one were told of our torture tactics, without being told the time and place, that we’d assume they belonged to some other regime with little to no respect for human rights.
I’m still thinkin’ this would all be okay if he’d used the Mongols. Gotta love the Mongols.
No- you are against torture because you think it is immoral ( I guess).
I think people will continue to support Durbin’s statements even though he has abandoned them because they refuse to feel they are giving an inch to Bush.
Actually, Durbin is my senator, and he will hear from me about this.
I think that not only should he NOT have apologized, I think he should have pressed the point home. I will write to him expressing my dismay that he did not stick to his guns.
I wish that Dems would see that we are at war in this country–an ideological war. And the Right has never pulled a punch once. We get nowhere by being wusses. We need to reveal the double standard ever present right now in behavior ( a certian senator’s denigration of the use of the Nazi comparison and then his own use of it a few weeks later springs to mind).
And having Durbin take a politcal move does not lessen my dislike of Bush and all he stands for in the least. Why would it? The two are unrelated.
I’m still trying to find what is so inaccurate about this statement. After all, if you did read the description and not know the origin, wouldn’t you assume that it came from a totalitarian regime? He did not compare Gitmo to the worst offenses under HitStalPot, but he did say that some of the worst abuses there are more consistent with the methods of regimes we should try as hard as possible not to emulate.
He apologized out of political necessity. Were his comments inflammatory? Sure. Were they wrong? I don’t think so.
ARGGGGG!!
This is like trying to nail jello to the wall.
Are you or are you not saying that people should abandon the idea expressed in his remark because he has retracted his remark and thus in your view it’s somehow false? Or is this just a tiny-bandwagon fallacy?