Alright, This Has Got to Stop
Senator Durbin, with eyes welling up, apologized for his poorly constructed Gitmo/Nazi analogy; via Salon's War Room:

Durbin's televised apology from the Senate floor was a sorry sight to see. He got all teary-eyed as he donned the sackcloth, quoting Abraham Lincoln and extending his "heartfelt apologies" to anyone he offended. If there had been a scarlet letter and a public stockade around, he surely would have used those, too. And for what? For saying that the military's worst mistreatment of detainees sounds like the sort of things that a Nazi might do.

But guess what? The Republicans won't stop piling on, first via the airwaves:

O'REILLY: Well, I mean, you're telling the world, senator, that we're a repressive country because you don't like coerced interrogation. Now, the FBI report, for those of you whom missed it, centered around a detainee who was chained to the floor in the fetal position. You know what the fetal position is -- that's not an uncomfortable position. Most of us sleep in a fetal position. OK? So picture the fetal position, most of us sleep that way. But the guy's chained. Now he can't move, he's down there. Then they either make the room unbearably hot or unbearably cold. And they keep the guy there for 24 to 36 hours in that position, so they can't go to the bathroom. OK? So that's what the FBI guy reported. That's what's got Durbin conjuring up images of Pol Pot, Hitler, and Stalin. So you make the call, you make the call. It's up to you. I'm not gonna tell you what to think.

Then via Republican congressfolk:

"While our men and women in uniform put their lives on the line each day to defend our safety and to protect our freedoms, I am sure the least they expect is the backing and the support of their leaders at home," said Rep. Deborah Pryce (R-Ohio), chairman of the House Republican Conference. "To the contrary," Pryce added, "what we've seen from Democrat leaders is a growing pattern of jumping at any chance to point the finger at our own troops, bending over backwards to promote the interests of terror-camp detainees while dragging our military's honored reputation through the mud." [...] Rep. Joe Wilson (R-S.C.), who joined Pryce at the press conference, told Cybercast News Service that it "is just inconceivable and truly incorrigible that in the midst of the war, that the Democratic leaders would be conducting guerrilla warfare on American troops. He also labeled the Pelosi/Waxman proposal for an independent commission "simply another example of some Democrat leaders trusting the words of terrorists over the proven decency of U.S. troops. "The American taxpayer is already providing accommodations for detainees, who are currently more comfortable than most of our men and women in uniform," Wilson added.

Durbin's speech never accused US troops of being Nazis--he only compared some of the more questionable practices in our Gitmo detention center to methods used by repressive regimes in history. But the Right Wing Noise Machine got hold of this and won't stop the echo chamber, even when Durbin cries "Uncle!" That's not Rove's style. He's a bully, and one who's at his wit's end trying to bale water from the sinking ship that is USS BushCo. And thus, in full bully mode, he let loose with this statement:

"Conservatives saw the savagery of 9/11 in the attacks and prepared for war; liberals saw the savagery of the 9/11 attacks and wanted to prepare indictments and offer therapy and understanding for our attackers," Mr. Rove, the senior political adviser to President Bush, said at a fund-raiser in Midtown for the Conservative Party of New York State. Citing calls by progressive groups to respond carefully to the attacks, Mr. Rove said to the applause of several hundred audience members, "I don't know about you, but moderation and restraint is not what I felt when I watched the twin towers crumble to the ground, a side of the Pentagon destroyed, and almost 3,000 of our fellow citizens perish in flames and rubble."

As my good friend and fellow Ole alum, York Norman, once uttered, "That's bullllllshit, man." (Yorkster, if you're out there, call into Cracks Central--we need you, buddy.)

Look, I'm all for a good he said/he said political cat fight, but this is starting to get out of hand. How about this, we liberals/progressives will stop with all the over-the-top accusations and analogies as soon as BushCo lets the UN human rights folks into Gitmo to assess the situation:

A team of four United Nations human rights experts accused the United States today of stalling on requests over the last three years to visit detainees at Guantánamo Bay and said it would now begin its own investigation without American assistance. "Such requests were based on information from reliable sources of serious allegations of torture, cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment of detainees, arbitrary detention, violations of their right to health and their due process rights," the four, all independent authorities who report to the United Nations on rights abuses, said in a statement issued in Geneva. One of them, Manfred Nowak of Austria, a professor of constitutional law and director of a human rights institute at the University of Vienna, said that mounting an unassisted investigation was "standard procedure" when countries resisted cooperating.

Yeah. That's gonna happen.