Durbin Fallout

In The Hill today, Lynn Sweet tells us that Richie Daley, mayor of the country's third-largest city for the past sixteen years, had a little problem with political naivete earlier this week when he called Durbin's statements on Guantanamo "a disgrace."

The mayor did not realize the impact his remarks would have, [Daley’s press secretary Jacquelyn] Heard said. . . .

The mayor did not understand that his comments gave the right-wing Internet websites, radio and cable shows the opening they were looking for and undermined Durbin.

Poor Richie. Today's politics can be so confusing.

Meanwhile, over at today's Chicago Tribune, columnist Eric Zorn offers a rewrite of what Durbin should have said to Daley and the Senate. Here are just a couple of samples:

"It's come to my attention that the mayor of the largest city in my home state raged at a news conference earlier today that I said our soldiers 'in Guantanamo Bay are Nazis.'

"I'm surprised. Though Mayor Daley can't even pronounce Guantanamo--he says it 'Gwa-ta-mahn-o.' And even though he blithely presided over the Cook County state's attorney's office during the biggest police-torture scandal in Chicago's history. And even though he mistily invoked 'what America's all about' at the news conference in which he announced a 'presumed guilty' program of posting photos on the Internet of people arrested but not yet convicted in prostitution stings.

"Still, I thought he'd be able to see through the false logic and deceptive paraphrases offered by my critics and focus his concern where it belongs: On what FBI reports say is being done to prisoners at Gwan-tahn-a-mo in the name of the United States of America.

 . . .

"If anything I said caused you to believe that I was equating American soldiers with Nazis or equating American leaders with Adolf Hitler or Pol Pot, then you are an idiot."