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"We shall pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship, support any friend, oppose any foe to assure the survival and the success of liberty." ~ John F. Kennedy

Contrast that statement, made 44 years ago during JFK's inaugural address, with the whining, anti-American claptrap coming from the leaders of the former president's party today.

Indeed, based on his hawkish defense of America against communism during his 1,000-day tenure, the nation's 35th president would be ashamed if he could hear the likes of Senators Harry Reid (D-NV) and Dick Durbin (D-IL), DNC Chair Howard Dean and JFK's own brother, Ted, as they spew their disrespect for the nation's brave men in uniform and give aid and comfort to our sworn enemies.

Reid called President Bush a "loser." Ted Kennedy has said that Saddam's death camp at Abu Ghraib was "open under new management, American management." And Howard Dean has made so many stupid, outrageous comments since taking the helm of the rudderless Democratic Party, it is hard to know where to start.

Last week, it was Durbin's turn. As the second ranking Democrat in the United States Senate, the senior senator from Illinois told the world (including our enemies, foreign and domestic) that making detainees at Guantanamo Bay detention center uncomfortable was tantamount to the treatment administered to prisoners by the likes of Hitler, Stalin and Pol Pot. Let us talk for a moment about that analogy.

In his remarks, Durbin read a list of some of the interrogation tactics used on terrorists caught trying to kill our soldiers on the battlefield in Afghanistan. These tactics included turning the air conditioning up and down to create extremes of temperature, chaining the prisoners to the floor in a fetal position and blaring loud rap music at them. While the latter may border on torture to those who appreciate real music, the idea that such mild procedures would have been used in the Nazi death camps, the Soviet gulags or the killing fields of Cambodia is ridiculous.

Sen. Durbin should ask his senate colleague, John McCain, if his POW cell in North Vietnam had air conditioning. Chained to the floor? Please. McCain can't lift his arms high enough to comb his own hair because they were broken so many times by his captors. Loud rap music? What horrible treatment. I'm surprised they haven't all cracked under the pressure and told us everything we want to know.

Here is what McCain had to say to Tim Russert on Sunday's Meet the Press: "Dick Durbin should be required to read Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's 'Gulag Archipelago' and I think that he may have a better understanding that there's no comparison whatsoever. And it does a great disservice to the majority of men and women who are serving in Guantanamo who are doing the job that they're told to do and they're doing it in a humane fashion. To tar the American servicemen and women with a brush that applies to the gulag or the killing fields is a great disservice to the men and women in the military who are serving honorably down there."

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