The Chicago Tribune fawns over Durbin’s “passion.” The paper’s editorial page says “Ignore him.”

The Boston Herald editorializes: “Durbin must go.”

Investor’s Business Daily: He “made Howard Dean look sane.”

The Wash Times: “Durbin’s degrading drivel.”

The New York Times editorial page: Nothing.

The Washington Post editorial page: Nothing. (There is an E.J. Dionne column titled “Where’s the apology?” Not about Durbin, but about the Schiavo autopsy.)

There’s a bright ray of sanity on the Los Angeles Times op-ed page. Yale professor David Gelernter’s piece is must-read. In fact, someone should read it on the Senate floor. An excerpt:

Ignorance of history destroys our judgment. Consider Sen. Dick Durbin (D-Ill), who just compared the Guantanamo Bay detention center to Stalin’s gulag and to the death camps of Hitler and Pol Pot — an astonishing, obscene piece of ignorance. Between 15 million and 30 million people died from 1918 through 1956 in the prisons and labor camps of the Soviet gulag. Historian Robert Conquest gives some facts. A prisoner at the Kholodnaya Gora prison had to stuff his ears with bread before sleeping on account of the shrieks of women being interrogated. At the Kolyma in Siberia, inmates labored through 12-hour days in cheap canvas shoes, on almost no food, in temperatures that could go to minus-58. At one camp, 1,300 of 3,000 inmates died in one year…

…If you are proud of this country and don’t want its identity to vanish, you must teach U.S. history to your children. They won’t learn it in school. This nation’s memory will go blank unless you act.

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