Durbin stages a media coup

Senator Dick Durbin has been taking to the local airwaves recently in his bid to become Ombudsman of All Media. Sam Madonia announced that Durbin would be on his show this morning (I arrived at work before the interview) to provide editorial direction on which news stories are fit to air. He made a similar plea on the Jim Leach Show last week. In particular, Durbin doesn’t want the media to pay attention to people who are mean to him. Especially those lying liars over at Move America Forward.

I’ve heard the ad that Move America Forward put together taking the Minority Whip to task for his use of the H word in describing alleged torture by U.S. service people. It is a twisted piece of propaganda that in its overly dramatic indignation almost crosses over into satire, only I'm not sure these people have a sense of humor.

Durbin never called our ruddy cheeked soldiers budding Khmer Rouge as the ad suggests, his insinuations were meant for those higher up the command. But it is just a tad bit disingenuous of him to cry foul when it was his over-the-top grab for media attention that started this debacle in the first place. The words he used to describe events at Guantanamo Bay were chosen more for the rhetorical sting they would deliver than to provide an accurate portrayal of the situation. I won’t get into the morality of what went on there except to say that if Hitler had limited his diabolical impulses towards Jews to turning down the thermostat and blasting bad dance pop then the word Auschwitz wouldn’t conjure up such horrific images. There are no corpse-filled pits at Gitmo.

It discredits dirty politics when its purveyors can dish it out, but can’t take it. Had Durbin stood by his Hitler/Gulag/Pol Pot analogy people could have decided for themselves if he is a traitor to his land or a defender of the rights of humanity, and then been done with the whole affair. Personally, I think he is neither. I think he is a politician who is much too sensitive to be rolling in the dirt with the Roves and Deans of the world.

Instead of cowing to the demands that he apologize and imploring the media to ignore the muckrakers on the other side, Durbin should exercise restraint when formulating his defamatory comments and not attempt to link the current administration to anything more brutally tyrannical than say a "Baby Doc" Duvalier or an Idi Amin regime. That way he could appease his base who desperately desire to think the very worse of Bush without sending the hypocrites on the other side into such a full-fledged tizzy.