Godwinzilla wreaks havoc

For some reason, I just can't post enough political links this weekend. So why stop now?

Here's a post by Derek Catsam on double standards in conservative outrage over Sen. Durbin's "Nazi" comments:

There is also more than a hint of opportunism by the right on this matter. For most of the Clinton Presidency and beyond (more on this momentarily), Rush Limbaugh referred to feminists as “feminazis.” Consider this in all of its audacity: women who supported legislation providing for pregnancy leave, or who wanted a form of universal health care, or who simply sat on the Democratic side of the aisle were being compared to Nazi killers. This clever usage of the pun was part of the name Limbaugh had given them! Where were the critics on the right?

And here's something I should have noticed a few days ago: If it is libelous to liken American actions to those of murderous foreign regimes, Caleb McDaniel wonders, can we at least compare American actions with American actions?

I wonder if Durbin's critics would have been nearly as vociferous if he had said, "Reading this FBI report, you might be excused for thinking you had stepped back onto a plantation in the antebellum South, or into a sweatshop in late-nineteenth-century New York, rather than into a twenty-first century military jail."

Perhaps some would have called for Durbin's apology for that too, on the grounds that Americans have moved beyond those sins of our past. But the fact that Americans have been capable of horrors in the past robs Durbin's critics of the right to say that the very word "American" does not belong in a sentence with the names of other countries with records of human rights abuses. We have a record of human rights abuses; we are not an unblemished exception to history.

| Posted by Wilson at 19:22 Central | TrackBack
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