NYT’s Frank Rich compares Bush, supporters to Hitler and the “good [ignorant] Germans”

Like the majority of glass-house dwelling New York Times columnists, Rich has simply lost it:

“BUSH lies” doesn’t cut it anymore. It’s time to confront the darker reality that we are lying to ourselves.

Ten days ago The Times unearthed yet another round of secret Department of Justice memos countenancing torture. President Bush gave his standard response: “This government does not torture people.” Of course, it all depends on what the meaning of “torture” is. The whole point of these memos is to repeatedly recalibrate the definition so Mr. Bush can keep pleading innocent.

By any legal standards except those rubber-stamped by Alberto Gonzales, we are practicing torture, and we have known we are doing so ever since photographic proof emerged from Abu Ghraib more than three years ago. As Andrew Sullivan, once a Bush cheerleader, observed last weekend in The Sunday Times of London, America’s “enhanced interrogation” techniques have a grotesque provenance: “Verschärfte Vernehmung, enhanced or intensified interrogation, was the exact term innovated by the Gestapo to describe what became known as the ‘third degree.’ It left no marks. It included hypothermia, stress positions and long-time sleep deprivation.”

You know Rich is getting desperate when he has to quote Andrew Sullivan, who didn’t turn on President Bush until he called for a constitutional amendment defining marriage as one man and one woman, as a definitive source on anything.

Continuing:

Our humanity has been compromised by those who use Gestapo tactics in our war. The longer we stand idly by while they do so, the more we resemble those “good Germans” who professed ignorance of their own Gestapo. It’s up to us to wake up our somnambulant Congress to challenge administration policy every day. Let the war’s last supporters filibuster all night if they want to. There is nothing left to lose except whatever remains of our country’s good name.

Curt at Flopping Aces puts things in perspective:

The fact of the matter is that we are waging this war as humanely as possible, often to our own detriment. Our troops are put into situations that are more risky then they need to be because we do not want to kill civilians. Those al-Qaeda agents we do capture could very well be executed on the spot if we follow the rules of war, but we don’t. We instead feed them and clothe them, and then interrogate them, as any responsible nation would that wanted to protect its soldiers and citizens. And interrogation via the use of sleep deprivation, or head slapping, or girls panties being placed on one’s head is not inhumane.

The torture chambers Saddam used was inhumane. The rape rooms that Saddam used was inhumane.

You know, those same chambers we put into mothballs because we invaded.

The left conveniently forgets that fact, to no ones surprise. In the end you cannot get over the simple fact that conservatives have been condemning large scale murder and torture by nation states such as Saddams for years, while liberals excuse it.

Except when it comes to places like Darfur, where they talk a good talk, knowing they’re not in any position to do anything meaningful about the genocide taking place there. But they talk about it anyway, in an attempt to make the administration look bad for not “doing more.”

A big part of the liberal Democrat philosophy on the world is that the US should be the chief country involved in humanitarian efforts, like stopping the genocide in Darfur, yet when a Republican president, as part of a strategy that involves targeting terrorists who are hell bent on the destruction and submission of the west, decides to remove from power a dictator who waged his own genocidal campaign throughout his time ruling a country, liberals then turn the other cheek. That dictator, they assert, was “no threat” to the US, and the money we’ve used on waging the war on that dictator and terrorists in his (now former) country to these liberals could have been put to “better use” here at home, rather than in defense of western values. Certain Democratic hopefuls for president have even recently asserted that the genocide that would take place in Iraq should the US begin an immiediate scale down and eventual pull out is, in essence, not our concern.

Furthermore, the Frank Riches of the world would like nothing better than just to forget that 9-11 happened, to forget that our old counterterrorism strategies weren’t working, and that in light of 9-11, the United States had to come up with a new, more aggressive game plan to counter terrorism not just abroad, but here at home, too. To Frank Rich and other uber-liberals like him, the fact that we’ve had to get more aggressive in our efforts against terrorism (and in only rare cases have gone over the line) equates to Germany under Hitler’s rule, where hundreds of thousands of innocents were deliberately tortured and killed in an effort by Hitler to “purify” the human race.

The interesting thing about all this is the fact that Rich and other staunch critics of the administration’s efforts in fighting terror really can’t find any examples that even come remotely close to mirroring what happened under Hitler’s rule, so they have to greatly exaggerate those rare cases where the US has stepped over the line in an attempt to morally equate the US’ aggressive tactics which target Islamofascists who mean to do us harm with Hiter’s tactics which were, again, designed to rid the world of its “undesirables.”

Rich is another in a long list of liberals whose perspective doesn’t extend beyond the inauguration of President Bush in January 2001. It almost makes me wish that time machines actually existed, time machines that could accomodate a large number of people, so we could encourage the numerous liberal columnists, journalists, and “scholars,” among other deluded lefties, who have asserted for years that this administration is essentially a modern day American version of Nazi Germany and that our troops are supposedly merely mindless followers, to travel back to that time period in history, and have them attempt to report from the front lines what they’re observing about Hitler’s regime.

That is, of course, assuming they wouldn’t be discovered first by the Gestapo.

PM Update: Captain Ed points to a Washington Post editorial that, simply put, states that General Petraeus was right, and his critics – of which there were many – were wrong (via Stop The ACLU).