Letter to Senator Durbin

Senator Durbin stood up to the administration, and then backed down. I wrote him a letter (via his website) last week expressing my support for him. Now I have written him expressing my disappointment. Here is what I wrote:

Dear Sen. Durbin:

I wrote to you last week with heartfelt praise and admiration for telling the truth about the illegal and immoral activities going on at Guantanamo Bay. I said then that you should not back down. What you said was absolutely true, and based on an FBI report.

I am very very very disappointed in you that you apologized for your remarks. I guess the national discourse today is such that we cannot tell the truth about what is happening in our country without being attacked. Surely Orwell would recognize this nation, where telling the truth requires apologies and hand-wringing, while the lies and the cruelty continue unquestioned and unexamined.

Unfortunately, now, YOU have become the story rather than what the Administration is perpetrating.

I am sorry that you felt the need to bow to right-wing pressure. I am sorry that our country cannot handle the truth. Actually, I think we CAN handle the truth - I am just not sure our leaders (sadly, yourself included) believe that we can.

I KNOW what you were saying was not that WE (our troops, our country, our government) are Nazis or Stalinists -- but we certainly could be mistaken for that based on the FBI report.

Why is that message so difficult to communicate? Because the Administration and its noise machine on the right will do EVERYTHING in their power to avoid answering, explaining, or opening up. Their tactics are secrecy, stonewalling and misdirection. You became the distraction; you took the blame.

I am not sure if you read my initial email to you last week; probably your office was so inundated with hate mail that it was lost in the shuffle.

I know you are a good man and I hope you remember that there are people out here like myself, my husband, my parents, my friends, and my sister (and our young children) who are residents of this great state who believe in democratic (small "d") values and want representatives who will fight, and fight hard, for those values.

God bless,

Fran Diamond
Skokie, IL

Durbin received a barrage of hate mail from the right wing. If you're a resident of Illinois and would like to express yourself as I have, contact Durbin at his website.

P.S. Eric Zorn agrees with me. Here's his idea of what Durbin's "apology" should have been:

"Hey, I'm sorry I played `the Hitler card.' It always inflames, distracts and confuses, and it never convinces. In this case, it let opportunists ignore my main point and gasbag instead about my unnecessarily overwrought metaphor and the many, obvious ways in which America is not Nazi Germany.

"But if you expect me to come before you and bite my quivering lips as I apologize to those who were spun into a dudgeon by the contemptible effort to draw attention from these infamous allegations, you'll be disappointed.

"I will not babble out a mewling defense of my patriotism to those with the vile audacity to have questioned it.

"A true patriot loves what his country stands for, not necessarily what his country does, and I will not shrink from holding America to her ideals...."