Sickening

As one of my readers pointed out the other day, I often use Ann Coulter as a voodoo doll. That's because Ann has said, among other things, that liberals are spineless, treasonous people who should be killed. It's in her New York Times best-selling book Treason. In fact, it's one of the "thesis" of that tome.

Tonight, I offer another voodoo doll, and I'm warning you right now that I'm gonna take some cheap shots.

If you've been around any kind of official news agency, you know by now that it appears that American and British soldiers (the "coalition of the willing," remember) have been abusing inmates in an Iraqi prison for the better part of the last year. You may recall that I posted something a while back about imprisoning family members of high-ranking Baathists as a means of flushing these wanted men out into the open - a tactic Saddam himself used against his opponents. You may recall my indignation: since there were obviously no weapons of mass destruction anywhere in Iraq, and the new PR spin on the whole war was LIBERATION, wasn't it a little hypocritical to be imprisoning the family members of wanted Iraqis - family members who, themselves, did nothing wrong?

If you thought I was indignant then, just wait.

It's bad enough that American soldiers are torturing these people. But we're not talking about lashes with a wet noodle here. We're talking riding a 70-year-old woman around like a horse. We're talking dragging naked people around by leashes. We're talking about forcing six men to stand together with their penises between each other asscheeks, because it's funny to make prisoners look like they are having anal sex with each other. Don't believe it's true? Go ahead and read the report. If you do, you'll be better off than Bush, who hadn't read it until this Tuesday.

Did you see how I sarcastically called it "funny" to do these things to the people we liberated? Well, there's someone out there who thinks it's all in good fun. Good old Rush Limbaugh. In a move that made me wonder if the Hillbilly Heroin was still coursing through his cholesterol-saturated veins, Rush said, and I quote:

"This is no different than what happens at the Skull and Bones initiation and we're going to ruin people's lives over it and we're going to hamper our military effort, and then we are going to really hammer them because they had a good time. You know, these people are being fired at every day. I'm talking about people having a good time, these people, you ever heard of emotional release? You of heard of need to blow some steam off?"

So there you have it. No big deal. They were just having a good time, blowing off some steam. You know, like a frat party, like a Skull and Bones frat party.

If you read through the article I linked to above, you'll notice that Rush also likens it to art produced with an NEA grant. A true class act, that Rush.

Mark my words: if this had happened under Clinton in Kosovo, and someone "liberal" like Howard Stern had made those remarks, he would have been yanked off the air faster than you can clap your hands - that is, if Clinton wasn't forcibly removed from office first for allowing this to happen. The greatest travesty of this is that no one on the right, conservative and neo-con alike, is calling for Limbaugh to remove himself from the air, or at least apologize. And Bush's approval ratings are still right around 49%. 49% of the people think he's doing a good job. Just let that sink in for a moment.

And have a good night's sleep.