Moronic Right Wing Smear Campaign

The flap over the comparison of Nazis with American troops at Guantanamo was described by the title of this blog.
Aside from the Nazi angle, real smear campaigns are based on lies. When Democrats said Robert Bork was going to bring back segregation, that was a smear campaign. When Democrats denied President Bush was in the Air National Guard, that was a smear campaign.
What Durbin said, Durbin believes. The Nazi comparison was implicitly made by Democrat Michael Moore when he said America "is known for bringing sadness and misery to places around the globe." Moore enunciated a theme going back as far as when Durbin's generation spat on veterans and called them baby killers.
Durbin's remark isn't really new. Democrats have felt this way for years.

Right for the Wrong Reason

This blogsite's good friend Richard "Maybe he has mad-cow disease?" Durbin has made many people, well, uh, upset over his comparison of American soldiers in Guantanamo to Nazis. I guess that when you hate the guy in the black Darth Vader helmet (for him, President Bush), that makes the soldiers in the piece souless white suited stormtroopers. It is often said that it is anti-semitic to compare the Shoah to abortion, but if anything about America seems like Nazi Germany, it sure as hell doesn't seem to be our troops at Guantanamo.

Thanks Jesse!

Today Michael Jackson avoided any legal responsibility for the ganamede- like behavior at his compound in California. In his cheering section was the Rev. Jesse Jackson. Why this concerned Jackson is anyone's guess. Maybe the Reverend thinks this behavior is a way of getting back at the race who screwed blacks. Or maybe we should have stopped looking for rational comments from the Reverend in 1992 when he said the Virgin Mary should have had an abortion. Anyway, thanks Jesse!

Cruelty to terrorists?

Recently, Amnesty International released a report calling the Guantanamo POW camp a "gulag." Real gulags were camps for Soviet citizens who violated section eight of the Soviet penal code. Section eight was applied to anyone suspected of opposing the Soviet state. Most gulag camps killed inmates through a combination of undernutrition and overwork.
This is not the case at Guantanamo. First, the prisoners aren't being killed. Second, the inmates were out of the protection of the Geneva Connvention because they wore no uniform in their combat against coalition and Iraqi forces. Even Northeast Regional Director of Amnesty International Josh Rubenstein called the gulag metaphor "overheated rhetoric."
This sort of report not only overstates the discomfort of the prisoners, it makes gulags seem less evil than they really were.