I apologize for my last entry. I should always step away from the keyboard and count to 100 before I post anything.
I don’t like to get political here very often. There are enough political blogs in the world, and we don’t need another one. While I love debating, I don’t like fighting in an arena where no one can be convinced that their point-of-view isn’t the Holy Truth™. There is no middle these days, and I’m a left-of-centrist–not far enough left to shun my conservative friends (or to think that they’re always wrong), but far enough that I can’t talk politics with them without pissing them off.
But I let my emotions on the whole Iraqi torture story get bottled up by not posting about it to begin with, by thinking that I could just leave it to everyone else to write about, and I’d get by with baseball and monkeys. The Limbaugh thing just blew the lid off the pressure cooker.
There are thousands of young men and women trying to do the best job possible in a country where people are willing to blow themselves up to kill them, and a few morons just made it a million times worse. Not to mention how much safer it makes us all by reinforcing the stereotype of Americans the terrorists have put in front of the Arab world. Why don’t we just get Disney to whip up some marketing materials for Al Qaeda recruitment while we’re at it?
And here we have a bunch of people–not just the fat blowhard who thinks it’s “not that bad”–who give it the “yeah, but Saddam was worse” routine. It’s not about whose torture was worse! Excuse my Pollyanna vision, but we’re supposed to be the good guys, damn it! We can’t just switch our story from “protecting the world from a madman with nukes” to “liberators of an oppressed people” and then try to wriggle our way out of our transgressions by holding ourselves up to a vile dictator and saying, “hey, at least we aren’t him” or by parsing the difference between “torture” and “abuse.”
Torture is wrong. If you support the use of torture, you are evil.
There. Now, I’ve gotten that out of my system. You may commence flaming, whilst I move back into silly mode. Thank you for your indulgence.
uuuuuuhhhhhhh… excuse me, but where exactly are the monkeys? Aren’t there supposed to be monkeys?
Or, how ’bout those Spiderman logos on the bases? Ooops, nope, that ain’t gonna happen now. Hmmmm, what to talk about, distraction-type…
I’ll stick with monkeys. It’s always about the monkeys. “Here they come…, walkin’down the street….”
the monkeys are hiding in Limbaugh’s butt.
nesting, is more like it.
I know – this all makes me so incredibly ill. Most people are sincerely grieved and outraged – reguardless of political party – and it’s that common sense of shock that makes me think that maybe we’re all in this together, and that political animosity that some people seem to feed on needn’t divide all of us.
But then there are some people like Rush… Honestly, I don’t understand people like him or his followers. If the entire government sat today and dispaired over this – including the pres. and all his men – why does anyone feel the need to say such things as Rush did? I don’t get it.
But then, maybe I shouldn’t.
At the risk of sounding like my parents about 30-35 years ago,
“What is this contry coming to?”
These images of abuse turn my stomach. I grew up thinking we were the “good guys”, now I’m not so sure.