"The Chicago Tribune's 'cheap stunt'"

AMERICAblog notes that the Trib finds enflamatory rhetoric okay when it comes to serious issues like producing an editorial page but that it's a "cheap stunt" when it comes to issues like prisoner abuse at the Guantanamo Bay prison camp.

Funny. The Chicago Tribune can write an editorial (yesterday) with the subtext that GOP Senators are in favor of lynching, but then when Senator Durbin reads a horrible description of prisoner abuse at Gitmo, and says, rightfully, that such a description sounds like what a totalitarian regime would do to prisoners, suddenly THAT comparison is a "cheap stunt."

Right. Because it's much more likely that 10 sitting US Senators are in favor of lynching innocent black people and hanging them from trees in the town square, than it's likely that our government could ever go too far and systematically violate the human rights of people who are different than us. Uh huh. Torture vs. lynching, and the Trib chooses lynching as the more probable scenario.

Now who's pulling a cheap stunt?

It is worth noting that the Trib's own editorial observed that Durbin "read an account by an unnamed FBI agent of the alleged treatment of a prisoner who was 'chained hand and foot in a fetal position to the floor, with no chair, food or water.' The prisoner, the agent said, had been subject to extremely hot and cold temperatures."

Does the Trib think that it is a "cheap stunt" for any American to say, as Durbin did, "This is the type of thing you would expect from a repressive regime. This is not the type of thing you would expect from the United States"?

Do they really think so little of the United States?

Update: More