Atrios points us to Howler, who express pretty solidly our feelings on Durbin being forced to apologize for speaking truth to power:

Indeed, the lunacy of the flap about Durbin shows the disturbing point we’ve now reached; if you’re a Democrat, a “firestorm” can quickly spread around you if you make remarks which are perfectly accurate. In this case, a Democrat actually did say something that’s about as mundane as “the sky is blue.” Have you read that FBI report–the report which Durbin was discussing? No one would associate the conduct it describes with the nation described in our civics texts, with the country you were taught to believe in as school kids. […] Durbin asked an obvious question: If you’d read that report, would you ever have thought that it was describing American conduct? Or would you have thought what Durbin said–that it must describe an evil regime, the type we have long denounced? The answer to that is perfectly obvious–and so is the state of our fallen culture, the culture being trampled under by the Russerts, the McCains and the Wallaces. But we’ve now reached a miraculous point in the crumbling of our discourse. We’ve reached the point where citizens are mocked by major scribes for wondering if we were lied into war–and where United States senators are told to apologize for denouncing the conduct described in that report. But then, lunacy has spread throughout our discourse over the course of the past dozen years. And your fiery “career liberals” have known to be silent. They looked away again and again. Now we see what that has bought us. Remember: If you’re troubled to think that we may have been lied into war, that makes you a “wing nut” to today’s “mainstream” press corps. And if you think that FBI report sounds un-American, you need to apologize to the Senate! McCain, Russert, Kristol, Hume, Wallace? They’ve turned their backs on sanity itself. Everyone has to fight this spreading press culture–and you have to ask more from those who kept quiet while this culture of insanity was born.