Dickless Durbin

Following is the text of a letter I sent to Senator Dick Durbin after his disgraceful, inexcusable, treasonous and FALSE statement comparing the U.S. military's treatment of terrorist detainees at GITMO with treatment of innocents in the Nazi and Soviet death camps. Enjoy. Who knows, maybe someone will even consider prosecuting him for the law he has clearly violated.


Richard Durbin
United States Senate
332 Dirksen Senate Bldg.
Washington, DC 20510

Dear Senator Durbin:

People like you are what is the matter with America today. If you think it will benefit you somehow, you feel no need to think through, question or restrain yourself at all, before going ahead and doing something, anything—regardless the consequences to others. Your recent comparison ON ANY LEVEL of treatment of terrorists at GITMO with the Nazi or Soviet death camps is a shocking demonstration of this, and for someone in a position of such responsibility is simply beyond belief.

I believe you are either an utterly selfish idiot, playing to your extreme left audience, or a deliberate traitor! Either way, your actions have the same effect: they give aid and comfort to our enemies. You have falsely supplied them with propaganda ammunition, which they will use to stir up their supporters and persuade fence-sitters. You have damaged our credibility in the world community and worked to turn the world against us at a time when we need their assistance in the War on Terror more than ever! You have demoralized our troops by increasing the dangers they face in the field as well as demonstrating to them that yet again, their leaders at home are willing to dishonestly discredit them for craven self-serving purposes.

While I agree that many of us consider living without AC and listening to loud rap music as torture, our enemies will use your testimony to justify GENUINE torture against any Western citizen, civilian or military, unfortunate enough to be caught by them, not that they exercise any self-restraint now. It will be similar in effect to that Newsweek ignoramus’s false report (I won’t give him more free advertising by repeating his name) of U.S. Soldiers flushing a Koran - only much, much worse.

There is just one word for this kind of irresponsible behavior when conducted by someone in a position of grave responsibility such as yourself:

TREASON!

You are a United States Senate leader for God’s sake! I believe you should suffer the fate of anyone so willing to carelessly put the citizens of his own country at risk as you have. You should be tried in a military court and punished to the fullest extent of the law.

You despicable, despicable, self-serving lowlife! You are undeserving of the title “Senator” and belong behind bars at the very least.

Sincerely,


James M. Simpson

P.S. I truly hope you face prosecution. Maybe then the damaging consequences of your conduct will sink in! If nothing else you could at least undo the damage somewhat by being an object lesson to the many other lowlifes in your party who would otherwise consider doing the same thing.

I Am Sick of Cowards

The Republicans really need to get their act together. I speak of the growing calls among the President's own party to shut down the terrorist detention center at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba (Gitmo, for short). I expect this kind of hubris from the Treason Party, the Democrats, because their agenda is to torpedo this Administration at all costs, but NOT from Republicans. Sadly, I am not surprised. We are so regularly treated to the bottomless stupidity of Republican politicians, I can't even ask the question. Were I not so totally discouraged however, the question would be: "HOW CAN ANYONE BE SO STUPID?!?"

First we have the mind boggling spectacle of Florida Sen. Mel Martinez joining hands with that imbecilic dictator lover, Jimmy Carter (who is living proof that Alzheimer’s can infect vegetables), to call for the detention center's closing.

Then we have the discouraging visage of Pennsylvania Rep. Curt Weldon trying to look serious as he gravely pronounces that Gitmo has "lost its viability."

Finally, that clarion call of virtue and wisdom, Nebraska Sen. Chuck Hagel, thinks we should move somewhere else. Sen. Arlen Specter, Pennsylvania Republican, will of course be holding a hearing.

What PLANET are these people on?? If, as Sen. Hagel claims, we are losing an "image" war regarding Gitmo, whose fault is that? How can we win if we are so timid as to allow our critics to make a patently insane comparison of Gitmo to the Soviet Gulags? How can we win if we can't even point out that people willing to riot to the death over ANY story in Newsweek, must be certifiably crazy?

Instead of catering to such lunatics, why aren't Republicans simply calling them what they are? The Democrats have Howard Dean, off his Prozac once again, who screams obscenities and lies about Republicans. Why can’t Republicans summon the will to simply tell the truth?

The terrorist "detainees" at Gitmo live better than many of them ever did in Afghanistan. A recent article in the Washington Times by Mark Steyn pointed out that Gitmo has more medical personnel than prisoners (“Selective Angst”, Washington Times, June 13, 2005, p. A17). Detainees who have been released left in better health and weighing more than when first caught. How many of the 20 million-odd Gulag victims went home that way? Oh, that’s right, I forgot: if they ever even left it was in a pine box.

And you can only repeat that five percent of the released detainees have since been recaptured in battle if it serves to assist in criticizing the Administration on its overall handling of the war. However, if you're talking about their treatment at Gitmo, then they are all innocent citizens, mistakenly captured on the field of battle, inexplicably in possession of AK-47s and shooting at our troops!

Why aren't these Republican "Men of Conscience" aggressively informing any media outlet who will listen, that according to the Pentagon, while five instances of Koran "abuse", (I can't even believe I am writing those two words side by side) can be blamed on U.S. soldiers who momentarily lost their grave respect for the sacred text, fifteen instances of "abuse" were meted out by the detainees themselves, including ripping pages out, urinating on the book, ATTEMPTING TO FLUSH A KORAN DOWN THE TOILET, and others??

Where is that little Newsweek weasel now? Has he reported this corrected version to repair the damage from his fraudulent report, which sent the Imams off their meds, causing rioting and death in Pakistan??

And why aren't these wise sages reporting all the other outrages being carried out against Muslims, which don't seem to bother the Muslims at all? Like the continued terrorist bombings of Muslims in Iraq? Like the recent burning of a Mosque by Robert Mugabe's communist government in Zimbabwe?

Why is nobody challenging the intellectually challenged critics of Gitmo? It should be like taking candy from a baby. Instead we have the spectacle of nitwit Republican handwringers, serving up propaganda victory to our enemies on a silver platter. It’s simply astonishing!

Finally, what would closing Gitmo accomplish? Do you really need the answer? We would be forced to move the terrorists somewhere else, where accusations of "Koran Abuse" would soon surface again. The camp would still be kept under an electron microscope by the same anti-American crowd who're doing it now. They would still lunge at the slightest opportunity to criticize. Ultimately, all we would do is squander federal dollars on relocating these terrorists and perhaps risk their escape in the process.

The Left would like us to release these "innocent civilians". They would be perfectly happy to see the terrorists once again free to express their first amendment rights with an AK-47 (which according to the Left’s legal sages, they have every right to express, just like the illegal aliens do). The Left wants to see us lose and they don't care how it happens.

So why do these idiot Republican Congressmen and Senators keep on trying to make the Left happy? It is because unfortunately too many of them are gutless, intellectually challenged, mental weaklings who earn the contempt of friend and foe alike by fawning to their critics. Hey Mel, hey Chuck, hey Curt, (forget Arlen): grow some balls and stand up to these Leftist scumbags! This kind of garbage will never stop until you do. And if you can’t stomach the thought, perhaps you’re overdue for retirement.

Responses to Criticism of "Why the Left Won't Support the GWOT"

I recently received a scathing criticism from someone on this recent article of mine. Without going into the invective, I will respond to the legitimate points raised which were:

1. The article "oversimplifies" by lumping all conflicts as a battle between the U.S. and global communism and anyone who disagrees with this or is critical of U.S. policy must be a communist.

2. That I called the McCarthy period a "fiasco" is taken to mean I thought what he did was all wrong, yet the rest of the article sounds to him like the McCarthyist rant of a "fevered" paranoiac. He equated my criticisms of the Left to "Stalinist tactics" which would presumably see all opponents to the Iraq war in a "gulag".

Response to #1. Well of course this argument is an oversimplification in and of itself and does not track with the assertions in the article but I will answer it anyway. To wit:

a. The vast majority of people everywhere are mostly concerned with themselves and their own lives. They don't have time or inclination to flesh out the labyrinth of facts surrounding public policy issues. There is even a term in economics for it: "rational ignorance." People are generally too busy with their lives, jobs, raising kids, etc. They are the innocents in the sense that if they follow a foolish policy, it is perhaps because they haven't really examined it critically. They generally react by emotion and are easily manipulated and subliminally intimidated into viewing various issues in certain ways. This is why so many members of the organized Left have found their way into the media and film. As Stalin once said: "If I could control Hollywood, I could rule the world." So he set out to do just that.

b. The organized Left in the U.S. and probably most other places, has its origins in the development of the Communist International first by Lenin, continued by Stalin, and having remained in place in one form or another although the name has changed frequently. This is not my opinion. It is a fact, easily verified by tracing the roots of organizations and their controlling members. A great site for studying the genealogy of groups and individuals is http://www.discoverthenetwork.org/ a brilliant piece of work by David Horowitz, himself a former radical and founding member of the New Left.

c. The organized Left, as represented by people like Lynn Stewart and groups like the National Lawyers Guild, ACLU and others, remain part and parcel of that movement. Once again, this is easily verifiable fact based on known party members and the roots of these organizations. Does that mean all members of the ACLU for instance are communists committed to the downfall of the West? Of course not. The vast majority are simply people believing mistakenly they work for 'human rights" organizations in the interest of "progress". They buy the propaganda that people who say otherwise are simply "fevered neoconservatives". In fact, such groups deliberately rely on having large memberships of noncommunists in order to give them the air of legitimacy. These are all standard Leninist tactics. You might benefit by reading some of his works.

Response to #2. First of all, most people are unaware of the fact that the invective "McCarthyism" was first coined in the 1950s by the communists themselves. So was the phrase "red-baiting". But never mind all that; here are my responses:

a. McCarthy WAS on the right track. And if you consider his one set of Senate hearings on concerns regarding espionage at one U.S. Army base in Monmouth, NJ, later found to be warranted, to be equivalent to Stalinist gulag tactics, maybe you need to join Amnesty International. After all, they compared the treatment of 500 odd terrorist prisoners at Guantanimo Bay, Cuba - most of whom live better there than they ever did in Afghanistan - to the decades long incarceration and starvation and torture deaths of tens of millions of innocent Soviet civilians in the Gulag Archipelago. Who may I ask, has the "fevered" imagination?

b. What made the whole thing a fiasco, was largely that McCarthy's U.S. Senate colleagues, in typically craven fashion, saw a bigger percentage in helping to destroy him than in confronting a much more bruising battle, namely the outing of traitors within the U.S. defense and diplomatic community and the whole issue of communist subversion throughout our society. They were helped in this battle by McCarthy's own character flaws and his alcoholism, as well as a very concerted effort by the American Left to discredit him. The end result was a political establishment intimidated from looking too deeply into the ongoing treasonous activities of American communists. That made it, truly, a fiasco of epic proportions, from which we still suffer today.

However, it need not have been McCarthy. He helped his enemies in a certain way by making a lot of tactical errors. But anyone who attempted to probe deeply into these issues would be faced with similar attacks. And the attacks would not abate until the prober was successfully denounced. This tactic has been successfully used since then, the most prominent example being the "Borking" of Supreme Court Justice nominee Robert Bork.

c. The whole point of all this is that we HAVE TO RECOGNIZE that there is an organized group quite deeply entrenched in the fabric of our society, which has the destruction of our society, through violence if necessary, as its stated goal. Lynn Stewart makes no bones about this. She is quite forthright. Why do you have so much trouble seeing this?

d. And if your answer is "What's the matter with communism?" then I think you've answered the question yourself. Communism is not the only evil we have faced over the past 100 years, but it is a primary one, and it is one whose potential for catastrophic and permanent damage to what remains of our society, far eclipses anything else we face. Anyone who can slough off the communist murder over the past century of 100 million odd innocent civilians as "breaking a few eggs to make an omelet", simply needs to have his head examined.

Why the Left Won’t Support the Global War on Terror

By Jim Simpson

In light of President Bush’s recent Russia trip to celebrate victory over Germany in World War II, or the “Great Patriotic War” as the Soviets called it, it is useful to ask: Why do historians, pundits, journalists, politicians the world over, and even Hollywood, celebrate World War II as the last “Good War” in American history?

How does that conflict distinguish itself from Korea and Vietnam, wherein we faced anti-war opposition both at home and abroad? Why do we today face such vicious resistance to the Global War on Terror from many of these same sources?

At first the disunity of our war effort today seems inexplicable given the unity that existed during World War II. The similarities between the two are striking.

In both wars, we joined with global allies to fight fascistic fanatics who committed mass genocide. In both cases we were attacked by surprise, completely without warning, in a strike that killed thousands. In fact, 9-11 can be seen as the more barbaric, since the attackers chose defenseless civilian targets. In both cases, Western civilization itself was targeted.

The stock answer is that during WW II we were all united in a common cause: to counter an imminent threat from a barbaric enemy and defeat the only genuine “Axis of Evil” that ever existed.

The truth is, as always, a little messier. For most of the period prior to our entry into World War II, there was a strongly expressed public sentiment against the war. We had declared ourselves a “neutral” country and a policy of “isolationism” found voices among both the right and Left.

One of the loudest came from the America First Committee (AFC), and its prominent spokesman, famed aviator Charles Lindbergh. Despite accusations to the contrary, the AFC was a genuinely patriotic organization at its inception and was guided by the following principles:

1. The United States must build an impregnable defense for America;
2. No foreign powers, nor group of powers, can successfully attack a prepared America;
3. American democracy can be preserved only by keeping out of the European war;
4. "Aid short of war" weakens national defense at home and threatens to involve America in war abroad[1].

A Yale University student named R. Douglas Stewart, who feared the consequences of another catastrophic war like World War I, first organized the AFC in 1940 with the assistance of other students, including Gerald R. Ford (yes, later to become President Ford) and Potter Stewart (later to serve on the U.S. Supreme Court). It quickly gained supporters on Capitol Hill and the financial backing of Sears & Roebuck Chairman, General Robert E. Wood. Before it was dissolved little more than one year later, the AFC had 450 local chapters and over 800,000 members.[2]

However, despite its charter specifically excluding “…Nazis, Fascists, Communists, or members of other groups that place the interests of any other nation above those of our own”, AFC was unable to completely prevent such groups from infiltrating. Charles Lindberg’s inflammatory speeches didn’t help, nor did certain other endorsements, such as a 1941 German Radio broadcast, which called AFC “truly American and truly patriotic.”[3] However the “Nazi sympathizer” brand was given the lie when Japan attacked Pearl Harbor. The group disbanded four days later, claiming in its final statement: “The time for military action is here.”

Meanwhile, the Left couldn’t make up its mind. Consider the following passage from the Encyclopedia of the American Left:

Under the leadership of Communist and Socialist undergraduates, the campus activists of the 1930s built the first mass student protest movement in American history. During its peak years, from spring 1936 to spring 1939, the movement mobilized at least 500,000 collegians (about half of the American student body, emphasis mine) in annual one-hour strikes against war. The movement also organized students on behalf of an extensive reform agenda, which included federal aid to education, government job programs for youth, abolition of the compulsory Reserve Officers' Training Corps (ROTC), academic freedom, racial equality, and collective bargaining rights[4].

Sound familiar? During this period, the communist Left was also finding its way into the news media, Hollywood and government in what is sometimes considered its most influential period in U.S. history[5]. Out of a need to hide their overt links to the Soviet Comintern, communist movements around the world stopped publicly identifying themselves, instead adopting “Popular Front” labels. Communists began referring to themselves simply as “liberals in a hurry.”[6]

However, the Left was forced to rethink its anti-war stance. Communist student organizations were horrified, for example, when the Neutrality laws they had supported in the early 1930s prevented U.S. aid from going to Spanish Republicans (primarily Stalin-supported communists) fighting Franco’s fascist forces during the Spanish Civil War[7].

In fact about 2,800 American communists and fellow travelers abandoned the pacifist role altogether to fight alongside Spanish communists as the “Abraham Lincoln Brigade.”[8] Their contribution to the Republican cause was even lionized by the famous American novelist and fellow traveler, Ernest Hemingway who said of them: “No man ever entered the earth more honorably than those who died in Spain.”[9]

Then came the 1939 Molotov-Ribbentrop Non-Aggression Pact between Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union, which pushed the American communists firmly back on the anti-war track and squarely behind the America Firsters. Their renewed commitment to pacifism didn’t last long however. They flipped again on June 22, 1941—the day Hitler invaded the Soviet Union.

With each new flip-flop, the American Communist Party lost more of its naïve, idealistic members and sympathizers, for it became painfully obvious that the Party had no principled attachment to any concepts, philosophies or ideals, only loyalty to the Soviet Union.

After Pearl Harbor, the entire country got behind the war effort and the time is heralded as one of the most unifying periods in our history. But for the Left, support for the war had nothing to do whatever with support for the United States. The American Left got behind the war effort solely because they correctly saw Hitler’s Germany as a clear and present danger to the Soviet Union specifically and the world communist movement in general. Hitler’s invasion of the Soviet Union was a “call to arms” for communists everywhere.

In short, the celebrated “unity” of the war years was actually the result a marriage of convenience between the virulently anti-American, American communist party and its unwitting partner, the rest of America. Following the war, Leftists quickly donned the anti-war mantle again.

The Left felt no threat to its survival from North Korea or North Vietnam. In those cases it was America that posed the threat to their fellow communists, so they remained “anti-war.” In the early 1950s, under scrutiny by the FBI and investigation by Congressional committees, communists kept a relatively low profile. After the McCarthy fiasco however, they got a breather. The FBI backed off and politicians of all stripes shied away from looking too closely at the activities of American communists lest they be branded “McCarthyites,”— a term coined by the communists themselves.

Nonetheless the situation warranted a change in tactics. The offspring of first-generation American communists came of age in the 1960s. They dropped the stigmatizing label and resurrected themselves as the New Left. Therefore, during the Vietnam War, instead of unity we got rioting in the streets, protesters “levitating” the Pentagon, the Students for a Democratic Society preaching revolution and the Weather Underground conducting terrorist bombings.

Today we have the Global War on Terror. And while it seems counterintuitive that the American Left would support “religious” fanatics diametrically opposed to their atheist agenda, the two groups in fact have more in common than they have differences. Both believe in totalitarian, one-party rule, both are rabidly anti-capitalist and above all else, both see the United States of America as the chief obstacle to their goals.

Lynne Stewart was, until her arrest for aiding and abetting terrorists, the attorney for Omar Abdel Rahman, the blind sheik who masterminded the 1993 World Trade Center bombing. She described Muslim terrorists as follows:

They are basically forces of national liberation. And I think that we, as persons who are committed to the liberation of oppressed people, should fasten on the need for self-determination…My own sense is that, were the Islamists to be empowered, there would be movements within their own countries…to liberate[10].

So it’s okay to support terrorism, Lynn?

I don’t believe in anarchistic violence, but in directed violence. That would be violence directed at the institutions which perpetuate capitalism, racism and sexism, and the people who are the appointed guardians of those institutions, and accompanied by popular support.[11]

Of course, the “racist” and “sexist” epithets are always hurled at the United States. I guess racism, sexism and oppression, the prominent features of all Muslim states, just doesn’t apply here. So in other words terrorist violence against America, its leaders and people (yes, we the people are the “popular support” she is talking about), is just hunky dory.

Stewart is a member of both the National Lawyers Guild (NLG) and the Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR). The NLG was identified as a KGB front in the 1940s and the Center for Constitutional Rights is an offshoot founded by the late radical Leftist William Kunstler, a longtime NLG lawyer. The CCR may be a familiar name. Spokesmen for the Center are regularly quoted on television news as strident opponents of border control and the USA Patriot Act.

These organizations and others have also supported and defended U.S. based Islamic organizations cited as either fronts for terrorists or terrorist fundraising operations. The FBI arrested University of South Florida professor Sami al-Arian in 2003 after a seven-year investigation. He had been North America’s head of the terrorist organization Palestinian Islamic Jihad.[12]

Al-Arian created two think tanks, World Islamic Studies Enterprise and the Islamic Committee for Palestine. Using these as cover, he traveled the country raising money, recruiting militants and making speeches preaching Jihad against America. At the same time he was actively crusading against legislation which would make “material support” for terrorists illegal. The NLG, the CCR, the ACLU, the American Muslim Council and the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) assisted him in this crusade. CAIR was created by the Palestinian terrorist group Hamas and has been linked to al Qaeda.[13]

These are but a few examples.

At this point you have probably been asking yourself if I am calling all liberals and anti-war types “communists.” Of course not. There are many well-meaning individuals who oppose war on principle; there are many more who identify themselves as “liberal.” There are too, quite a few who rather mindlessly identify themselves as favoring some amorphous “World Peace.” Whatever the case, the vast majority are not communists. But Lenin had a word for these people: “useful idiots.” Whether they know it or not, they advance the agenda of America’s enemies.

For example, the NLG, CCR and CAIR all receive significant funding from the Tides Foundation, which in turn has received multimillion dollar donations from Theresa Heinz-Kerry, wife of 2004 Presidential candidate John Kerry.[14] While I can’t imagine Ms. Kerry has a clue what she is doing, it is a demonstration of how effective these groups have been at insinuating themselves into the “mainstream” that they should receive such support.

And while it is easy to understand how some may oppose the manner in which this administration has conducted the Global War on Terror, the strident, obstructionist opposition to any action by the United States reveals the true agenda of the anti-war Left. They merely criticize; they offer no solutions. They simply do not want us to win and have been working overtime to prevent it.

American communists remain to this day the driving force behind the anti-war movement. They are the driving force behind news media efforts to discredit the administration and smear the troops. This is not news to many of us, but if you want the gory details, former radical David Horowitz has written a seminal book, Unholy Alliance, Radical Islam and the American Left[15], which meticulously documents their widespread penetration of government, academia, the news media and other organizations, their close cooperation with Islamic terrorist groups and the overall malevolent nature of their agenda. Horowitz should know; he was once one of them.

They plot against our institutions while hiding behind the ample protections our Constitution and legal system provide. They sabotage our military efforts while basking in the safety provided by our military’s blood sacrifices. They agitate against our economic system while living large on the benefits of its affluence. They sneer at the achievements of our great democracy while demanding “Democracy Now!” They are a class of willful, nihilistic parasites.

Despite the “fall” of the Soviet Union, communists and their filthy spawn are more prevalent in our government, newsrooms, college campuses, and Hollywood than at any time in U.S. history.

Individuals and groups, which used to be shunned by our media, are seen daily among the talking heads on network and cable television and quoted regularly in newspapers and books. They have water carriers on Capitol Hill bought and paid for. Their influence over what we see, hear and read every day is palpable.

The virulent, almost suicidal desire of today’s radical Left to see the United States of America defeated by someone, anyone, trumps all other considerations. Therein lies the straightforward reason we have not enjoyed support from the Left for the Global War on Terror or for that matter any conflict since the “Great Patriotic War.”

The Left wants the terrorists to win.





[1] Sheldon Richman, “The America First Committee”, The Future of Freedom Foundation, April 1995.
[2] http://www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/USAfirstC.htm
[3] Richman, op cit.
[4] Encyclopedia of the American Left (New York : Oxford University Press, 1998), edited by Mari Jo Buhle, Paul Buhle, and Dan Georgakas, p. 799-802.
[5] Eric M. Breindel, a review of The Heyday of American Communism, by Harvey Klehr, in Commentary magazine, June 1984, p. 78.
[6] Ibid. p. 79.
[7] Encyclopedia of the American Left.
[8] http://www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/USAfirstC.htm
[9] As quoted in William Katz and Marc Crawford, The Lincoln Brigade, New York: Atheneum, 1989, p. 79.
[10] Monthly Review, November 25, 2002, as quoted in Horowitz, David, Unholy Alliance: Radical Islam and the American Left, Regnery, 2004, p. 187.
[11] Ibid.
[12] David Horowitz, Unholy Alliance: Radical Islam and the American Left, Regnery, 2004, p. 188.
[13] Ibid. p. 189,199.
[14] Ibid. p. 241.
[15] Op. cit.