Solonor's Inkwell

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.

I am so fucking pissed right now, I can barely see straight.

Excuse my language, but this big, fat idiot has pushed me over the edge.

I try not to jump to the conclusion that a blogger (especially a gossip columnist type like Wonkette) has not taken a quote out of context. So, I went looking for evidence of the following statement about the torture of Iraqi prisoners:

LIMBAUGH: Exactly. Exactly my point! 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?

I found it. You can hear the audio of the moron at Media Matters for America.

Somehow actually hearing him chuckle his way through a comparison of prison torture to a fraternity prank pissed me off way more than reading it.

I have to stay off the Internet until my blood pressure comes down.

Flavored Asian Cigarettes are Extra Harmful

Mmmmm… *cough*… cherry… *hack*…