Marching to the wrong drummer

Mark Steyn, writing in the Chicago Sun-Times, takes on Dick Durbin's recent rhetoric (tip to The Corner at NRO.) Durbin's ranting make an easy target and I won't bother to quote Steyn's critique of both Durbin's and Amnesty International's attempt to draw moral equivalence. What interests me is not debating whether Gitmo is the Gulag or whether U.S. troops are equivalent to PolPot murderer's, these are not serious questions. Rather I'm concerned that seemingly important people do consider these important questions, or even more disturbing, that people in leadership roles could think such silly things. Here's Steyn:

This isn't a Republican vs Democrat thing; it's about senior Democrats who are so over-invested in their hatred of a passing administration that they've signed on to the nuttiest slurs of the lunatic fringe.

This is exactly what I have been trying to express. I feel the frustration of a centrist who finds that the policies of the current administration are occasionally, perhaps even often, objectionable, and that the opposing party supports policies I like better, but I also find that the Democrats have lost themselves in a dangerous and ultimately destructive lunacy. There is no way I could, in good conscience, support a party founded on bigoted hatred, even if I happened to also dislike some of the people they hate. It is possible to oppose the right people in entirely the wrong way. You are probably familiar with Martin Niemöller's observation on Nazism that begins, "First they came for the communists, and I did not speak out-- because I was not a communist." (I find, in searching for a link, that there is some disagreement in the exact quotation. Choose one that works for you. This one works for me. Its the idea that I am trying to reference here.) People who take pride in their hatreds, and are indiscriminant and careless in how they define it, are ultimately a danger to everyone, and need to be held up to ridicule, or at least contradicted. Sooner or later everyone is a target.