TPM summarizes part of the testimony of the nominee for attorney general, Michael Mukasey, thus:
The Bybee memo is "worse than a sin, it's a mistake," Mukasey said. He referenced the photographs taken by U.S. troops who liberated the Nazi concentration camps in 1945 to document the "barbarism" the U.S. opposed. "They didn't do that so we could duplicate what we oppose."
"Duplicate what we opposed"? Nazi concentration camps? Does that remind you of anyone?
In a Senate floor speech Tuesday, [Senator Dick] Durbin cited an FBI report describing Guantanamo Bay prisoners chained to the floor in the fetal position without food or water and sometimes in extreme temperatures.
"If I read this to you and did not tell you that it was an FBI agent describing what Americans had done to prisoners in their control," he said, "you would most certainly believe this must have been done by Nazis, Soviets in their gulags, or some mad regime -- Pol Pot or others -- that had no concern for human beings."
Is it not clear that Mukasey's and Durbin's point is exactly the same? And do you recall, as I do, the phenomenal blog-storm and Fox News conniption and outrage from every other pro-torture platform on the web? Here's a classic Reynolds-Steyn post ridiculing and scorning those who were concerned about what was going on at Gitmo. Let's see if Reynolds or Steyn will lambaste the incoming attorney-general on the same grounds, shall we? Or will their double standards reveal their partisan hackery again?