Locate The Disgrace

Another round of Instapundit bed-shitting. Here's what Richard Daley said re: the Dick Durbin kerfuffle:

"I think it's a disgrace to say that any man or woman in the military act like that," Daley said.

Glenn Reynolds adds, substantively:

Good point.

A good point despite the bad grammar, I suppose. All Durbin did was quote the eyewitness account of an FBI operative of bestial treatment of prisoners---and then asked his colleagues which regime would first spring to mind as countenancing such horrors.

Look how far we've come: the apologists denied that torture had occurred and continues to occur; when that position became untenable, they denied that it was widespread; when that position became untenable, they denied that it was systematic; when that position became untenable, they excused conduct just as long as it wasn't as bad as Saddam Hussein's; when that position became untenable, they excused conduct just as long as it was different from Saddam Hussein's; now that that position has become untenable, they're actually celebrating the abuse. (Don't believe me? Think I'm exaggerating?) And all the while, they accuse those of us, for and against the Iraq war, who've been on the side of decency in detention policy all along---those of us who have, so to speak, maintained a consistent moral position and eschewed relativism---of everything from defeatism to pacificism to anti-Americanism to constituting a fifth column.

We need a better term for the apologists than "apologists." There's something deeper at work. Their ideology is a kind of meta-nationalism that reaches back to the James Burnham camp in the early Cold War, which thought that the US had to adopt some of the devices of totalitarianism to have a chance to beat the Soviets.

Apropos of whom, Glenn Reynolds would have made an ideal citizen of the USSR.

BTW: I posted a thingie about Durbin at Hit & Run, and the comments thread is fairly interesting (and still growing).

UPDATE: Here's what Daley actually said (and the grammar checks out):

It’s a disgrace — and [Durbin] is a good friend of mine — but I think it’s a disgrace to say that any man or woman in the military acts like [Nazis] or that a report is like that...You go and talk to some victims of the Holocaust and they will tell you horror stories, and there are not horror stories like that in Guantanamo Bay [emphasis mine].

Got that? It's a disgrace to say "that a report is like that"; i.e. it's a disgrace to say that the FBI report says what it says.

Daley: I'll never be the asshole my old man was, but I'll still be the biggest asshole I can be.