Taranto on Steyn on Senator Dick on Gitmo.

With an unhealthy dose of Gloria Steinem, obviously thrown in for her quantum stupidity and her head-spinning, sick-making logic.

Mark Steyn argues that Dick Durbin's slanders are worse than indecent, that they actually harm American interests:

If you close Gitmo tomorrow, the world's anti-Americans will look around and within 48 hours alight on something else for Gulag of the Week.
And this is where it's time to question Durbin's patriotism. As [Sen. Pat] Leahy implicitly acknowledges, Guantanamo is about "image" and "perception"--about how others see America. If this one small camp of a few hundred people has "drained the world's good will," whose fault is that?

The senator from Illinois' comparisons are as tired as they're grotesque. They add nothing useful to the debate. But around the planet, folks naturally figure that, if only 100 people out of nearly 300 million get to be senators, the position must be a big deal. Hence, headlines in the Arab world like "U.S. Senator Stands By Nazi Remark." That's al-Jazeera, where the senator from al-Inois is now a big hero--for slandering his own country, for confirming the lurid propaganda of his country's enemies. Yes, folks, American soldiers are Nazis and American prison camps are gulags: don't take our word for it, Senator Bigshot says so.

But there's a problem with this argument. Steyn rightly rejects the contention by Durbin, Leahy & Co. that by not coddling terrorists, America is inflaming the enemy. But if closing Guantanamo would not appease would-be terrorists, what makes Steyn think that they would be appeased if politicians refrained from lunatic exaggerations like Durbin's? (Indeed, one could argue that such exaggerations, if believed, may have a deterrent effect.)

Anti-Americanism is not a rational response to America's faults but a form of bigotry. Trying to appease it is futile. "If you are part of the wrong group, nothing you do is right anyway!" observes Gloria Steinem. "So you might as well do what you [obscenity deleted] well please, you know! I mean, there's no way of behaving in order to get approval. . . . If you do that, you've given the approver all the power."
(Thanks to Best of the Web Today)