A tightrope over an abyss, and the vital importance of doubt

Jeff Harrell, blogger at Shape Of Days, has a phenomenal post on the Durbin/Gitmo/War on Terror debate. He starts off agreeing with Durbin! Read the whole thing. Some favorites:

So a balance must be struck. On the one hand, if we descend to public torture and executions and abandon our ideas of justice and propriety, we abdicate our claim to cultural superiority. But on the other hand, if we simply turn the other cheek, the terrorists and their totalitarian Islamist leaders will wipe us off the face of the earth. This war, as much as any war in our nation’s history and more so than some, is a war of survival. If we choose not to fight, our culture will be overwhelmed by the totalitarian Islam that gathers like a wave in the poor corners of the earth, poised to surge out and bury the liberal democracies of the West. But on the other hand, if we fight this war too thoroughly and too well, our culture will vanish because we’ve chosen to abandon it.