Mainstreaming Torture, Part 1-- Why Bill O'Reilly Ought To Be Sodomized With a Broken Light Bulb:
There is a bizarre sexual fetish that has its own storytelling adherents on the Internet and in print. These people get off on the idea of people swallowing other people. No, no, not Dahmer-esque cannibalism, eating away bit by bit from the body in the fridge. Here, a man, say a patient at a dentist's office, is able to unhinge his jaws, snake-style, to engorge whole the poor female dental assistant whose only crime was to care about tooth decay. Goddamn, how these people spank it or rub it to the tales of people-swallowing. Whenever the Rude Pundit watches Fox "News," he thinks that Rupert Murdoch must have the entire on-air staff masturbate to this kind of porn.

Last night, on his Fox "News" show (if by "show," you mean, "a horrid hour of hell-like suffering at the hands of an attention whore whose ego would make him suck out the eyes of old lady Alzheimer's patients if he thought it would get him another ratings point"), Bill O'Reilly devoted the first segment to criticizing those who write and talk about the allegations and confirmed reports of torture at the hands or desires of the United States. Apparently, see, the media must be liberal if it dares to say that torture is bad because, you know, reporting on torture hurts our soldiers and helps the enemy (most of whom would be, well, Iraqi citizens). No, no, if you think that the real problem is the act of torture, you'd be a "pinhead" in O'Reilly's world.

Spat O'Reilly, "Just the allegations alone hurt this country and shift emphasis from the real villains, terrorists, who routinely murder civilians. Day after day, the left-wing media pound stories about America's mistreating prisoners in Guantanamo, in Iraq, in Afghanistan. Those reports are picked up worldwide and are used to incite anti-American feeling and even to recruit more terrorists." Oh, yeah, O'Reilly offers the caveat that prisoners have been tortured and people have been prosecuted, but, "Any reasonable person knows that, in a vicious struggle, some rules will be broken." O'Reilly continues, "The trouble is the continuing reportage of the torture allegations is putting lives in danger. Hyping the situation to undermine the Bush administration is disgraceful and should be condemned." Then O'Reilly used the opportunity to slam Ted Kennedy before squinting his eyes as if he had just tasted bile.

Then O'Reilly had on two military guys to agree with him. For instance, Col. David Hunt said, "Torture is one tool" in interrogation. Later, he opined, "This is about political will. The fighting - - the war on terror is about political will and commitment, and torture is one small part of how this has to be approached. You can't hide about it." O'Reilly was almost giddy, like a Bangkok pimp at some village girl's school. He derided Kennedy and that undefinable "left wing media" throughout as his guests propped up his big damn head like the house slaves at the plantation home of a drunk master.

Oh, how O'Reilly, who danced, danced, danced with glee as he fed on the corpse of Eason Jordan, the CNN exec who said that U.S. troops kill journalists, did a little boogie after the interview. So happy he was, deploring the effort to find out how much and how regularly America tortures people, and O'Reilly (and millions of his viewers) brings it down to this: we need to define more clearly the rules of torture because, you know, we're gonna capture people and detain them until we've used them up and said fuck due process and during all those months and years we are gonna sexually humiliate them and beat them, so, hey, let's make the rules clear so everyone knows what they can and cannot do. O'Reilly then took a huge shit on his desk and wiped his ass with the Geneva Conventions, screaming, "Fuck your 'international rules.' Your treaties aren't even good toilet paper." And across the nation, O'Reilly's fans cheered at seeing O'Reilly degrade ideas and documents that they do not even want to understand beyond what is filtered through the seething, grunting, spittle-spewing mouth of O'Reilly.

O'Reilly and the right are part of the effort to mainstream torture, to make it seem rational and right to bloodthirsty America, the America that believes that if the "terrorists" are going to behead innocent people, then America has the perfect right to torture and "detain" anyone it sees fit, even if a "few innocent people" get caught in the fishing net (and isn't "detain" just the most polite fucking word? It's like you've been asked to stay a little longer at the cotillion in order to ensure the debutantes are escorted out properly, so you tell your party, "Sorry, I've been detained." Yeah, it's like that, but with more nuts-in-vises and fake menstrual blood smeared on your face- well, except for that one cotillion in Georgia, but that's another story).

If torture becomes just another "tool" in the interrogation box, a regular, regulated thing rather than an horrific abomination, then maybe the Christian right is correct: why bother believing that evolution exists?