what makes a liar two

In response to the what makes a liar post a few days ago, Chad wrote:

Did you miss the part about where Durbin compared our soldiers to people who ran Nazi death camp because a little urine got accidentally splashed in a Quran? And you're worried about Karl Rove?

It's a good question.

I did catch the Durbin thing -- though i wouldn't characterize the portion of his speech i heard in quite the way Chad did. Mr. Durbin said something like If i read this to you and you didn't know where it came from, you would think it described the actions of people we all agree are the bad guys.

If Mr. Durbin was saying Americans, representing America, have done/are doing things unworthy of the American ideal, I agree with him. And that seemed to be the spirit of his seemingly half-hearted apology a few of days later. He didn't apologize for the core argument; he apologized that someone -- you perhaps -- might have thought he was painting everyone in an American uniform as a Nazi/Stalinist/Maoist.

This is not Mr. Durbin's attitude toward service people. In March 2005, for example, he offered an amendment to the new banruptcy bill seeking...well, here's the language: To protect servicemembers and veterans from means testing in bankruptcy, to disallow certain claims by lenders charging usurious interest rates to servicemembers, and to allow servicemembers to exempt property based on the law of the State of their premilitary residence.

The bill passed. Mr Durbin's amendment failed, 58-38. Except Mr. Jeffords of Vermont and Mr. Specter of Pennsylvania, everyone who sought to exempt servicepeople from harsh treatment under a more stringent bankruptcy law were Democrats -- the liberals Mr. Rove slandered this week in New York. Put another way, no Republican except the embattled Mr. Specter, voted to protect American troops from losing the farm while deployed in Afghanistan or Iraq. You tell me what that means juxtaposed against Karl Rove's comments.

A better man than me would have posted his embarrassment that Howard Dean spoke so broadly and contemptuously of Republicans in the last month. That man was not available at the time, but he is now. Some of my best friends are Republicans...

My objection to Mr. Rove is what appears to me to be a long and storied history of lying. T.S. Eliot's wrote:

The last temptation is the greatest treason,
To do the right thing for the wrong reason

If this is true of doing the right thing, how much more is it true of doing the wrong thing?