Unspinnable:
Man, that must have been quite the slide show, what with the photos of Saddam’s glorious palace mixed in with the photo of the prisoner forced to sodomize himself with a banana to the point of bleeding. Then a photo of a "family" of soldiers, smiling in front of an ill-equipped Humvee, followed by a video of a prisoner being slammed repeatedly against the bars of his cell. Now that’s some motherfucking postmodern “art” for you.
The Rude Pundit would have loved to have been in that room – not to see the pictures (unlike the sick fucks in the media, the Rude Pundit does not need to have horror slammed in his face to understand it exists). But, goddamn, it would have been fun to see the looks on the faces of all those in Congress who voted for the war realizing, en masse, “Holy motherfuck, if the public actually begins to understand what this means, I’m fucked.” Man, if Strom Thurmond had been around, his diaper would have stunk much more than usual. Hell, Dennis Hastert probably belched up last week's burrito from the House cafeteria. And then they were all left wondering how to spin it all – how to create a believable layer of lies and obfuscations and distractions.
The problem is this: what happens when a spin machine meets an unspinnable story? Oh, sure, there's all the attempts to make the abuse at Abu Ghraib and other prisons less of a story than the reporting of the story. Yep, there's Tom DeLay, picture of humanitarian goodness, saying, "Some people are overreacting . . . The people who are against the war are using this to their political ends," ignoring the idea that perhaps, in a Bushwhacked world of black and white, one can say that forced sodomy and enforced degradation are objectively bad things. Then again, a blood-soaked Tom DeLay could be standing over the semen-stained corpse of an eight year-old boy and tell the cops they were just trying to play politics by arresting him.
And what an infantile little worm man is Senator James Inhofe of Oklahoma. What a specious, absurd cock-tip. You've read his loud fart of dismay at the Senate Armed Services Committee Hearing: "I'm probably not the only one up at this table that is more outraged by the outrage than we are by the treatment." He continued his rebel yawp of idiotic, blind patriotism on CNN later: "We are spending an awful lot of time worrying about the human rights of a bunch of murderers and terrorists, people who are in Cell Block 1A and 1B, which means they are the very worst kind. And yet we are not nearly as concerned about our own fighting troops." This was just before Inhofe said that the interrogations are for "information," not to punish criminals. In other words, Inhofe seems to say, one can be tortured if one is presumed to "know" anything.
Even as Donald Rumsfeld takes a tour of Abu Ghraib ("So, it was right here that you stacks the naked guys? Hey, take a picture of my ass here - it'll be a souvenir"), he has told Congress that he approves of the interrogation "techniques" used on detainess and prisoners, even as such techniques obviously violate the Geneva Convention, which is so much shit-ridden toilet paper to the Bush administration. Oh, they're trying to spin, spin, spin, baby, that all of this is for the good of the country. But photos, man, they don't lie. The yahoos may want us to level the whole country (hey, just like back in 'Nam), but for most of the country, forcing women at gunpoint to bare their breasts, like some sadomasochistic "Shia Girls Gone Wild," is unequivocally evil.
But here’s the question to all of these morons who seek moral equivalency and eye-for-an-eye-isms when it suits their needs: What if one of those prisoners, like the guys with the dogs, was completely innocent and had no information? Now, what if over 6 out of ten of them were? Woe to the country that cannot stand up for principles over vengeance, for ideas over men and women. This President, this administration shall pass. But the rest of us have to go on.
