Gitmo remark stains image of Ga. senator

Opinion: May 30, 2013 at 12:00a.m.

By Dusty Nix

Columbus (Ga.) Ledger-Enquirer

Georgia’s soon-to-be- former U.S. Sen. Saxby Chambliss had this to say about President Obama’s address on the Guantanamo Bay prison compound:

“The president’s speech today will be viewed by terrorists as a victory.”

Really, senator? Really? The old “You’re with us or you’re with the terrorists” bit? So we still haven’t risen above that rock-bottom routine.

Maybe the senator’s words were ... you know, “taken out of context.” Maybe the Liberal Media left out some clarifying phrases, like “aid and comfort” or “fellow travelers,” or “I hold in my hand the names of 200 known al-Qaida sympathizers in the Obama administration.” Maybe he used words like “collaboration” and “appeasement” while rattling the disinterred bones of Neville Chamberlain for dramatic effect.

To be sure, there’s a serious and intelligent conversation to be had among serious and intelligent people about the Guantanamo Bay gulag. And anybody who thinks that debate breaks along strictly Red-Blue lines has been staring off into space for the last decade or so.

A MONSTER WE CAN’T DESTROY

Sometimes I think Gitmo is a little bit like Thomas Jefferson’s infamous comparison of slavery to holding a wolf by the ears: You don’t like it, but you don’t dare let it go. Which is another way of saying we create monsters we can’t destroy. The same way we create senseless and useless and tragic wars we’re soon told we can’t “cut and run” from.

In recent years, it seemed as if one of those serious and intelligent people was Saxby Chambliss. The senator was showing all the signs of wanting to walk away a statesman rather than just a politician, building bipartisan coalitions to deal with crucial but politics-paralyzed issues. Anybody who sincerely tries to bridge the poisonous partisan divide instead of just giving lip service and then accusing the other side of “partisanship” deserves the benefit of the doubt.

SENATOR’S MR. HYDE SIDE

But this public linking of a political opponent — especially when that opponent is the president of the United States — with terrorism is his Hyde side, and I’m not talking about a former congressman named Henry. It’s a needless regression to that incomparably loathsome first Senate campaign against Max Cleland.

Sure, this will probably get Chambliss some loud cheers and a few speaking gigs with the hard-core Obamaphobe constituency back home. I mean, just look at the parade of kinky fringe right-wing geeks lining up to succeed him. If that’s the crowd he wants to be associated with, he’ll be remembered not as a statesman, but as just one more agent of the South’s self-marginalizing — a form of secession far more devastating than the kind a bunch of country club white trash pols enjoy yelling about.

Is that where you want to be numbered, senator? Is this what you want the curtain call on your career to be? If Americans can agree — and it seems, thank God, most of us do — that comparing political foes to Hitler and opposition parties to the Third Reich is not just uncivil and over the top but downright loony, where does linking them to our deadliest and most hated enemies rank on the political indecency scale?

Calling the president’s speech a victory for terrorists is beneath any minimum standard of decorum for the U.S. Senate. It’s beneath the dignity of somebody who would be recognized as a statesman. It’s beneath the baseline level of respect for the presidency. As politics, it’s beneath contempt.

Dusty Nix is the opinion-page editor of the Columbus (Ga.) Ledger-Enquirer. Distributed by McClatchy-Tribune Information Services.