Rule:
It's precisely BECAUSE we're not the Nazis, that we have to hold ourselves to a higher humanitarian standard.
Bush thought he could get away with people finding out about so-called torture-lite, but the americans won't have it.
Attorney General Gonzales had to retract an earlier memo on torture that anyhting short of death or organ failure
was OK, but the fact it was ever sent at all shows you the cold crulety of this administration. A lot of people say Bush 43
is stupid. Those are innocent lambs. I wish it were all that simple and less ominous for the US and the world.
Did anyone hear that the US EPA got the G-8 member-nations to remove a lot of language about the dangers of global
warming that they were going to be discussing in their upcoming annual meeting? It has gone from paragraphs detailing this imminent global threat to a somewhat interesting challenge. What kind of stick did we use to accomplish that?
Amid some congressional democrats calls to close Guantanamo, Senator Durbin said, of an incident where a prisoner
was exposed to extremes of hot and cold temperatures and loud rock music 'til he tore his hair out,something like, if
an FBI agent were describing practices at Guantanamo and you didn't know it was about the US, you might be inclined to think he or she was talking about some terrible dictatorship like the Nazis, or Pol Pot, that had no regard for human beings. [We may not get to hear that description, as the US Army has been sitting on their report into Gitmo since April 1st! Anyway, I'm not saying it has to close. Just stop torturing people, tell the prisoners what charges they're facing, if any; and give them a trial. "Even Eichmann had a trial," says John McCain, speaking of the man repsonsible for the Nazi death-camps.]
Well you wouldn't believe the hooting and hollering on Fox News, and from many places in Washington! In order to
defend themselves when they had no leg to stand on, the republicans mangled grammar and language to whine that
Durbin had compared us to the Nazis. Durban then released a statement of regret that the parallel had been misinterpreted,
but I don't think it was even a direct parallel.
This reminds me of when Hillary Clinton got up in the wake of the 2004 election to complain about the vote fraud.
[I'm going to clarify this in a 6/23/05 post.]
Since the republicans knew the Ohio vote was in doubt for many of us, you wouldn't believe the amount of angry
spewing they did to defend Bush's win. Sore winners. And they totally missed the point: Hey! A lot of the election fraud seemed to accrue to George Bush.
Senator Durbin was trying to tell us something. Things are seriously wrong. You don't defend the existence of the camp
(I might grant you that it could still exist), by getting as hysterical as hyenas. I saw a video of the offending speech and I thought Durbin seemed every bit as reasonable as any civilized old democrat of the last century, a group which today's WSJ professes to miss.
No comments:
Post a Comment