I take it that you are similarly “not a fan of”
Jeff Sessions
James Inhofe
Tom Cole
Phil Gramm
Congressman Steve King
The even-tempered-not-at-all-hot-rhetorician Ken Mehlman
Grover Norquist
Oopsie! See above. (Ugh - sorry bro, once again. How embarrassing.)
Wether I am a fan or not of these guys, anytime that they invoke Hitler in the pursuit of political gain, I will call bullshit. I am a conservative, but I can call them out when they desreve it.
The santorum version of RISK? Ewww. I wouldn’t be a fan either.
“Draw another Risk card.”
“No! Oh please God no!”
The use of torture. The disregard for human rights by the guards.
Tell me, if I told you that a prison kept its prisoners chained up in “stress positions”, were beaten to death and were kept chained to the floor in extreme temperatures, and then asked you whether this was done in a Nazi concentration camp or an American prison, which would you have guessed?
Maybe. I’d have to see the complete video to be sure. The media has developed a disturbing habit of turning everything into a sound bite. That works for riling up the nation’s LCD, but it seldom serves to actually inform.
What Nazi comments from the Democratic side have you personally disavowed, Hentor? You haven’t been especially vocal in this area.
Or are only Democrats allowed to make Nazi comparisons?
Why don’t you start with Durbin and Byrd, if these examples bother you so.
Wrong, wrong, wrong.
The gulags and concentration camps were perpetrated against their own citizens. Gitmo primarily houses terrorists (insurgents? bah…) captured in foreign countries. Americans don’t believe in torture or abandoning due process for American citizens. MOST Americans, when it comes to torturing foreign terrorists, would gladly supervise…
Nitpick… but if the ratio is anything like Abu Graib, expect most people at Gitmo to be innocent.
Well, that’s all well and good, but that’s not the point I was making, which is that your OP is basically one gigantic logical error. Oddly enough, Dick Durbin is not the fashionplate for leftist rhetoric. What he says, and what he retracts, has very little bearing on the opinions of most liberals. To expect anyone to change their mind simply because he did is foolish, at best.
You’re right. I’m actually much more troubled by rank hypocrisy than allusions to Nazis.
Actually, anyone can. I’d like to see us all move away from getting our panties in a twist by someone making reference to Nazis. But first I’d like to see you Republicans take your hypocritical false outrage and shove it up your collective asses. How about you specifically start showing an ounce of integrity. That would be a nice start.
How about I start with you?
http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showpost.php?p=5649137&postcount=27
I love their reasoning for the denying the comparison:
“Gitmo isn’t bad as a Nazi concentration camp as no one has died… Yet”
But the fact of the matter remains that I and others find our country great partly because of the moral high ground which it maintained before the Republicans fouled things up. Now the only thing we can say in our defense is “even though we beat, torture, and intimidate our prisoners, we don’t kill them and therefore we aren’t like the Nazis. Besides, they deserve it.” I don’t think the idiots who tow this line are aware of just how dangerous this thinking is. What’s next, killing a few hundred prisoners and justifying it by saying “at least it’s not as much as the Nazis killed”?
Some people might not give a fuck anymore but this is America we are talking about here. We once represented freedom of thought and human rights against those regimes that would use brutality to justify their rule. Now we are engaging in the exact same sort of tactics. If you don’t care about what is going on in Gitmo you may not care about what is becoming of the very soul of this nation. We have let these idiots subvert what it means to be an American. We let them use the flag and the language; in speeches which are “patriotic” but that are in reality represent nothing but an ostentatious parody of what are country stands for. If you really think that that fat fucken palooka redneck Toby “what’s his fuck” waving a giant American flag is a representation of what America stands for then you are sadly mistaken. This smokescreen about Durbin is the same. Just a show to detract from the real enemy of our country and leading cause of death for our servicemen: BU$HCO.
The common grunt (or special forces operative) isn’t required to torture anyone so how they were able to twist this around without someone pointing a finger in their face calling them a fucken LIAR is beyond me. However, I would never apologize to those spooky fuckers who are doing the torturing. People who torture other people are not patriots but are the same sort of scum that would make a great Nazi… PERIOD
So you equate “stress positions” and being chained to the floor in the heat to what the Nazi’s did? You are in dire need of a history book.
That doesn’t really answer his question, though, does it?
Y’know, I had a whole bile-filled post ready and waiting, but I’ve decided to scrap it. Kudos to Durbin, even if you think he lied, he did the right thing both morally and politically. His comments were wrong. The people who supported his comments are wrong, and if they can’t see why, then history is doomed to repeat itself.
What worries me though, is that when the next ACTUAL Hitler, Stalin or Pol Pot steps up to take his place in history, that we will have been so blinded by the inflammatory rhetoric and so desensitized by the desire to impugn our opposition, that we will miss it, and horrors like those perpetrated by history’s ACTUAL madmen will continue unabated.
Prisoners in camps in France (probably elsewhere too)were in fact not allowed to lie down or sit down for three days prior to their execution. Equating stress positions with what the Nazis did is exactly correct.
And no, I won’t say sorry too. I’m not in the public eye so I don’t care about whether or not a bunch of crybabies threaten to hold their breath until they turn blue because my choice of words hurts their precious feelings.
Yes. A very valid concern.
International Red Cross observer 1: “Well, we’ve got repression, intimidation, torture, concentration camps, gas houses… What do you think - is this the next Hitler?”
International Red Cross observer 2: “Hmmm. I’d be tempted to say yes, but ever since I heard the words of US Senator Dick Durbin, and US Senator Robert Byrd before him, I’m… well, gosh darnit I’m just not sure anymore.”
International Red Cross observer 1: “I know what you mean. The line is just so blurry, and since so many people have invoked Nazism to sway opinion, I’ve just gotten so sick and tired of the whole thing. You know, really, who can say anymore.”
International Red Cross observer 2: “Yeah. Let’s go get a coffee.”
If I were more wedded to the Bush=Hitler analogy, I could argue that that is what’s happening in this very thread.
But I’m not, so I won’t.
This is all, of course, just stupid. If you people want to engage in a pre-adolescent pissing match like a bunch of hormone crazed junior high school thugs you are welcome to it.
What the Senator said was: This thing is more like A than it is like B. The response from people who may or may not like “this thing” was to trumpet to the high heavens that the Senator had equated A and B, said that A and B were the same thing. Clearly he did not. It serves some people’s interest to say he did. The Senator took the easy way out. No credit to him for that. One more win for the bullshit machine. No honest discussion of the merits of the FBI report the Senator was relying on. Just bullshit.
We went through the same thing with Amnesty International with a similar level of intellectual dishonesty.
All I ask around here is a little honesty. I’m not seeing much of that.