First, the United States was attacked wantonly and cruelly in major degree for the first time since the Civil War. The Congress responded immediately by giving the president the sanction of girding our defenses so that at no future time would such so many lives be taken as were on September 11. Senator Durbin supported this action. But from the outset, in his special role as Senate Democratic Whip, he has involved himself in strenuously opposing all major actions by the President as Commander-in-Chief while engaging in a masterly subterfuge. The bill of particulars will be detailed here at a future time. Suffice it to say for now the question is: Given our respect for dissent by elected members of Congress, is it possible for one to commit sedition and serve as an obstructive force to conduct of the war?

U. S.. historical tradition has been exceedingly lenient with those who criticize presidents on their war plans. Congressman Abraham Lincoln for one was a great critic of President James Polk’s wish to enter the Mexican War. He served one term, declined to seek reelection and was far from a leader of the then Whig party. His criticism was marked but he supported appropriations to continue the army in the field and in no way could be said to have given aid and comfort to the enemy. His opposition was well within the circumscribed boundaries of responsible debate.

In my own lifetime, Republicans have criticized both the intentions of presidents to go to war and/or the decisions of a president to go to war. Ohio Senator Robert Taft, regarded as a Republican leader from the first day he joined the Senate, whom I supported for president in 1952, was a critic of our joining Britain in World War II if there would be no overriding action to commit us to the conflict. Taft, along with almost all Republican Senators of the period-including Senator Arthur Vandenberg of Michigan-followed the same policy which can be described as supporting a build-up of our defenses, aiding Britain in all steps short of war: the same position advocated by both President Franklin Roosevelt and Wendell Willkie in the presidential campaign of 1940.

Taft voted for all appropriations for the military services as well as the Lend-Lease Act, supporting an increase in the number of aircraft to 6,000, supported the National Defense bill, the bill to establish a reserve of strategic and critical materials, the bill to create a two ocean navy, legislation increasing the Army to 375,000 when FDR didn’t recommend an increase beyond 225,000. While he expressed hope that diplomacy would not draw us into war, Taft’s position was clear as a supporter of a strong national defense and an ally of Britain in all ways short of direct involvement. Likewise with the leading Republican foreign policy lawmaker in the pre-war period, Senator Vandenberg.

Assuredly there were Senators and Congressmen in both parties (Sen. Burton K. Wheeler, D-Montana, Sen. Gerald P. Nye, R-N.D. and Sen. C. Wayland Brooks, R-IL among them) who harshly criticized FDR on a personal basis charging that he was leading the nation to war. None were in the leadership of their parties and none hurled attacks on soldiers in wartime; none ever remotely spoke of comparing our troops to troops of harsh, repressive dictators. Sen. Durbin is the second-ranking Democrat in the Senate and, as is widely known, used an anonymous source in the FBI to compare our soldiers guarding prisoners at Guantanamo, Cuba with the vilest torturers in world history.

Obviously there have been Senators who have so exceeded the bounds of civility that they have been censured by their fellows. The most recent case was that of Sen. Joseph R. McCarthy (R-Wis.). While latter-day revisionists now say that McCarthy was right in his estimate that some persons high in the federal government were active, conscious and articulate instruments of Communist conspiracy (as the Venona Papers now attest) there is no doubt that in many specifics he was reckless and in certain cases in total disregard of civil liberties. Sen. McCarthy, a subcommittee chairman not an elected leader of his party, was censured and died of acute alcoholism: in all, his period of influence did not exceed five years.

There can be little doubt that Sen. Richard Durbin as the second ranking member of the Senate minority has been given one of the highest posts within the power of his party to confer. By listening to him and watching the visual on the Blog www.censuredurbin.org you can hardly equate his highly inflammatory charge…a charge which has caused him to apologize to the Senate not once but twice…a charge that earned him criticism from Mayor Richard M. Daley among others…a charge that so cruelly misrepresented the work of our soldier-guards as to give active aid and comfort to our enemies.

As this nation and all the world, sadly, knows, he likened American interrogators of the vilest terrorists, quarantined from society to protect this nation from assault, to “Nazis, Sovietsd in their gulags or some mad regime-Pol Pot or others-that had no concern for human beings.” His vicious language which stunned even liberals in his party dominated the news cycle for days. Then Durbin hastened to the floor to do the usual explanation without accepting blame, declaring that he regretted any misunderstanding over his remarks. That failed to quell the furor. He returned to the Senate floor and issues an emotional non-apology, complete with tears which said “if” he had offended any, he apologized.

For this alone-a totally unpatriotic tirade that the dispassionate Almanac of American Politics says was extreme-censure should be applied. But there is more. Earlier, in July 2003, he took to the Senate floor to declare that the Bush administration was trying to push him off the Intelligence committee-but it is open speculation and far more than rumor that Durbin leaked classified information to the detriment of the United States and its troops. To try to defend his unpatriotic misrepresentations as just par for the course in a nation which values dissent…ignoring that we are in a war for our survival where all of us should watch our language…would be the height of incredulity.

It is safe to say that no one in the modern history of the Senate-and perhaps none in the entire history of that body-has been so identified with actions that are deleterious to conduct of war in which our survival is at stake. His abject, slash and burn partisanship is the scourge of the Senate. He voted against the Gulf War authorization in January, 1991 and voted against t he Iraq War authorization in 2002-but he did vote to authorize the use of force in Iraq when Bill Clinton was president, in February, 1998. The late Steve Neal, the liberal Sun-Times political columnist dismissed him as “a hustler.” Always twisting and turning remarks with a masterly legerdemain, Durbin is probably the nation’s most obvious national security risk: completely at variance with the liberal tradition of Hubert Humphrey and Eugene McCarthy, both of whom were patriots and neither of whom were security risks.

In my lifetime, it was a former American hero, Col. Charles Lindbergh, who came the closest to Sen. Durbin in his assaults on those who were empowered to defend this country. Lindbergh was a private citizen, was unelected but in a series of town hall meetings inflamed the country although we were not at war. As a rebuke to Lindbergh, FDR held a news conference in the Oval Office. The president reached over and picked up a Nazi Iron Cross which had been sent to him by one (not Lindbergh) who was returning the decoration out of disgust for the Nazi criminals running Germany. Noting that Lindbergh had received high decorations from Hermann Goering, Roosevelt said that for Lindbergh’s service to Nazi Germany, the flier deserved the Iron Cross. Even the press corps gasped.

The differences between Lindbergh and Sen. Durbin are several. As earlier stated, Lindbergh was a private citizen and did not represent the government of the United States-Durbin is a high member of the Democratic minority in the Senate. Lindbergh was up to that point one of the nation’s foremost heroes for being the first to fly the Atlantic: Durbin has not compiled any record aside from his lifelong careerist status of politics. Lindbergh never apologized (in a sense, Durbin has not either, having used the old dodge that “if” he offended anyone, he was sorry). Lindbergh offered to enlist in the Army Air Corps even at middle age. His offer was understandably turned down. Then Lindbergh went to the South Pacific as a private citizen and, as history records, in an aerial encounter with several Japanese Zero aircraft shot down several of them. Even this has not rehabilitated Lindbergh but did serve to make the point that, however benighted, he was a patriotic citizen. Unfortunately the book on Durbin’s support of this war effort ends with his insult to American troops, an insult that presents doubt that he is interested in anything higher than his own and his party’s left-wing factional partisan ends.

Thus the record shows clearly that Senator Durbin’s irascible and viciously partisan behavior threatens the lives of American troops is unparalleled for a Senate leader in American history. Should the Senate receive 250,000 signatures calling for censure, one would hope it would take the matter under advisement. The idea, expressed by some, that to consider censuring Durbin would be a waste of the Senate’s time, is fallacious. Just as Joseph Welch told an arrogant Senator McCarthy “at long last, sir, have you no decency?”-a statement that caused many Americans to insist on a limit to vituperation-the censure of Richard Durbin would show that the tolerance of the American people with unreasoning demagoguery that puts our troops and this nation in grave danger--a far worse offense than Joe McCarthy committed in his most excessive hour--is not unlimited.

Durbin is an orator of a type. Not one who speaks with conviction, just an orator who orates with salubrious effect. After he finished apologizing not unconditionally but “if”-“if I have unintentionally” hurt anyone, he turned on his critics with this persecution-prone utterance: “My critics from the Republican side have carefully orchestrated this! They have used all the resources…Fox, the Washington Times, Rush Limbaugh. They clearly want to keep the spotlight on me and away from other issues!” One can’t be censured for no class-but Durbin’s lack of it makes it easy. Thus the numbers roll in to Jim Leahy. Cast your vote and add your signature today. You’ll find the link-up in the left-hand column. This Blog and Jim’s will be among the very few to carry it: it’s too unconventional for many others to do so. And don’t count on the media to refer to it. We’re blacked out: are you surprised? But the liberals know about it. Check the names we’re called on this Blog’s Reader’s Comments to get a flavor of some of the vitriol. Then gargle with Listerine.

Since President Bush’s poll numbers hit 90 % after Afghanistan, Durbin and the Democratic Party have gone on an unprecedented campaign to make this war impossible to win. From the trumpeting of the death toll in Iraq, every time it hit a good round number. To charging our service men and women as keepers of torture chambers, Senator Durbin and his fellow Democrats have kept up a steady drum beat of negativity. Of course its allies in the Mainstream media (MSM) have been there to print each and every charge as truth, no matter what the history, no matter what the truth.

It was President Bush who was a fault for 9/11! It didn’t matter that he was in office for seven months and the same group had attacked those same towers 7 years before! It didn’t matter that none of the information learned in that investigation was shared with the national security agencies. Why? Because the attack was treated as a crime instead of what it was, an attack on the United States an act of war! It was the Clinton administration that had compiled the intelligence Bush used to decide what to do with Iraq! Most of the 16 United Nations resolutions that were never lived up too were put in place during the Clinton administration. Saddam kicked out the inspectors under Clinton. Yet according to Durbin and the Democrats Bush lied, and they had to get the American people to agree.

Senator Durbin was given the number two spot in the Senate because, his seat seemed secure and he was the only one who would take the chance of attacking the President during wartime. At first it was Senator Durbin by himself with the help of the MSM, but when his colleagues saw the GOP leadership would do nothing to quell the seditious talk it grew louder and louder. Like spoiled children the Democrats are going to the edge to see what they can get away with. When they go too far as Durbin seemingly did last summer with his now famous comparison of our Military with “Nazis, Soviets in their gulags, or some mad regime Pol Pot or others.” They pull back give fake apologies and the MSM gives them cover.

After the blatant attack by Durbin the country was outraged. Durbin’s own friends said he went beyond the pale. As Newt Gingrich pointed out in his letter to Senators last summer demanding Durbin be censured
“This moral equivalence isn’t just utterly false; it endangers the lives of our young men and women in the military because it arms every radical Islamist with the official-record words of a Senate leader to justify their war of terror against civilized people everywhere….A Senate censure of Senator Durbin is justified and would reaffirm a standard for healthy, rational debate.” The GOP leadership did nothing! Senator McCain absolved Durbin even though he is not an elected leader of the Senate Republicans and the leadership let it go at that.

There is a price to pay for not Censuring Senator Durbin. Censure is a process put into place by the Congress to enforce limits to partisan rhetoric. In a body that is meant to be a debating society, limits have to be enforced without suffocating opposition, but keeping that debate within limits. You can look back over the last year and see how the rhetoric has gone beyond just opposition; it is now fanning the flames of hate! Our enemies are using the open partisanship to extend the war. But the real problem is not just Iraq it is now spreading to the rest of the Middle East. It is spreading to North Korea and Iran. Our hero’s in the military deserve someone here at home to speak up for them. It is not fair that Senator Durbin use their sacrifices to attack their Commander in Chief; and undermine their hard work by strengthening their enemies. The “insurgents” as the MSM calls them (terrorists is what the solider in the field call them) are not fighting to win the battles they are fighting to win the propaganda war.

That’s why I have undertaken this project. It is time we reset the guidelines that have been wiped away. We can disagree without giving aid and comfort to our enemies. I believe I can make this charge because of the partisanship Senator Durbin has shown over the last decade. In 1990 Senator Durbin voted against the Gulf war. In 2003 he voted against the current war in Iraq but in 1998 when a Democrat was in the Whitehouse he not only voted for military action he said and I quote “I call on those who question the motives of the President and his national security advisors to join with the rest of America in presenting a united front to our enemies abroad” I would ask the Senator why then and not now? It is something I hope the leaders of the Senate ask the Senator when his Censure for Sedition is voted on from the floor of the Senate. It is something that will help set parameters for future generations.

If you agree please go to WWW.Censuredurbin.com and sign the petition

==>Ronald Reagan Tribute to Marines who died in Lebanon