David Neiwert on Durbin, Gitmo, and the Right Trying to Force Us All Over the Cliff

This piece is worth reading in its entirety, but here's a snip:

Dick Durbin was right. The practices at Gitmo, as well as everywhere else in the American "war on terror" detention system, as Amnesty International is insisting, need to be shut down and investigated, precisely because the torture techniques that Rush Limbaugh and Michelle Malkin are so quick to defend are practiced only by inhuman monsters: Nazis, Stalinists, tinpot dictators. In defending them, they only reveal their own inhumanity, and the depths to which they have fallen.

They constantly refer to the events of Sept. 11, or the horrors of Saddam Hussein's regime, as justification. But the comparative standard for our behavior is not Saddam. Monstrous acts do not justify further monstrousness. And it is no victory for America if, along the way, we lose our soul -- as does any person, let alone nation, who condones torture.This is why their attacks on Durbin are so vicious.

They are so intent on taking America with them over the cliff and into this moral abyss that they will destroy anyone who dares remind them of their own moral vacuousness. Not only do they intend to silence dissenters, they intend to eliminate them. John Carlson, in the end, was only giving final voice to the entire thrust of the "Durbin scandal."