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Do the right thing, America!

Way back on May 18 of last year, back before the Party of Lincoln had caucused and decided to become the Party of Torture and Protracted, Agonizing Death, I found a story about a Bush Administration official who was upset about Abu Ghraib, and I posted the following:

From MSNBC, under the headline “Abuse scandal ‘terrible’ for U.S., Powell concedes”:

NEW YORK - Secretary of State Colin Powell said Monday that the Iraq prisoner abuse scandal had had a “terrible impact” on America’s international image as the Bush administration fought back against reports that it encouraged the abuses by emphasizing a get-tough approach to interrogations.

In a commencement address at Wake Forest University in Winston-Salem, N.C., Powell said the furor over U.S. abuse of Iraqi prisoners at the Abu Ghraib detention facility was a recurring theme at an international economic conference he attended in Jordan over the weekend.

He said he told the foreign leaders: “Watch America. Watch how we deal with this. Watch how America will do the right thing.”

Now, I don’t want to get on Colin Powell’s case here, since he’s clearly the only member of the Bush administration who gives a flying frog for the Geneva accords, and reportedly he objected strongly to Alberto Gonzales’s January 2002 memo to Bush, which unambiguously “encouraged the abuses by emphasizing a get-tough approach to interrogations.” He’s also, so far, the only Administration official with the moral integrity-- or the cojones-- to admit that Abu Ghraib is a terrible international disaster for the U.S.

But what’s with the diction?

He said he told the foreign leaders: “Watch America. Watch how we deal with this. Watch how America will do the right thing.”

Do you suppose those were his exact words?  After all, he is quoting himself.  Or is this just what happens to reasonably intelligent people after more than three years of serving a President whose favorite book is The Very Hungry Caterpillar?

Dear Mr. President, I went to another country.  In this country there were many foreign leaders.  Foreign leaders come from other countries too.  I told the foreign leaders:  Watch America.  Watch America do the right thing.  Do the right thing, America.

And yes, I’m confident we’ll do the right thing.  We’ll make sure those seven or twelve rogue soldiers take the fall.  Fall, soldiers, fall!

I write now to apologize to my readers, and to Colin Powell.  Though I am loath to admit it, my initial response to Powell’s remarks was not nearly caustic or skeptical enough. Everyone knew that the soldiers would fall-- hell, it was their fault for bringing those damn dogs and Hefty bags all the way with them to Iraq in the first place.  But a more appropriate response would have gone something like this:

Looking far into the future, Powell said, “Watch America.  Watch how we deal with this.  Watch how America will do the right thing.  You’ll see, you foreign leaders.  We will take the civilian administrator in charge of Iraq by the scruff of his neck, and we will force him to accept the Presidential Medal of Freedom.  We will haul the Secretary of Defense out into the open, and, ignoring his natural shyness and disdain for the limelight, we will tell the world that he is the best Secretary of Defense this country has ever had.  And just you wait until we get our hands on the little creep who came up with the rationale for torture in Guantánamo and Abu Ghraib in the first place!  When we find this guy, we won’t hold back-- we will display him in public for days on end, all in the course of promoting him to the highest law-enforcement position in the United States!

“You just watch us, you foreign leaders.  You ain’t seen nothing yet,” Powell concluded.

This humble blog once again stands corrected and ashamed before the world.

Posted by on 01/10 at 11:19 AM

  1. He also said, “And remember the American soldier who pushed that Iraqi off the bridge just to watch him drown?  Watch how we sentence him to six long months in jail, and then put him right back on duty!

    Posted by  on  01/10  at  01:19 PM

  2. And remember the guy who authored the torture memo designed to cover everyone in the decision-making chain who expressed disdain for the Geneva Conventions?  Watch how we make him Attorney General.

    Posted by  on  01/10  at  03:03 PM

  3. Sorry, Michael. Still not caustic enough. This one needs the plain style: Colin Powell is a bitch. And lest you think me sexist, I mean that in the doggiest sense.

    Posted by  on  01/10  at  04:35 PM

  4. Terence,

    Seems to me you’re ready to join the Pooping Pack.  Just tell me, who does Number 2 work for?

    Posted by  on  01/10  at  04:47 PM

  5. Let’s just say I’ve had two large helpings of Moist ‘n’ Meaty and I haven’t been walked yet, Corndog. As for Number 2, it’s hard to say, since Mini Me is in the White House and Dr. Evil is Veep.

    Posted by  on  01/10  at  05:13 PM

  6. In order to be truly and sufficiently caustic, you’d need to allude to Al’s architecting of the secrecy surrounding Cheney’s Energy Task Force, with likely memorandial references to things such as “quaint and obsolete” Holocene climate patterns.

    Posted by Chris Clarke  on  01/10  at  07:32 PM

  7. I think you’re being too hard on yourself, Michael.  None of us could have known last May that the administration would flat out lie to us.

    Posted by  on  01/10  at  10:30 PM

  8. Thanks, Doghouse.  You’re right, it’s the lying that hurts the most.  It’s such a betrayal of the public trust-- we could never have expected this.

    And oh yes, as my distinguished colleague Terence has recently reminded me, Colin Powell is a bitch.

    Posted by Michael  on  01/10  at  11:29 PM

  9. It’s not the lying that has hurt so much, it’s the relization that they have never told the truth, on anything, at all.

    Posted by  on  01/11  at  02:18 AM

  10. Are you guys still going on about Abu Ghraib? That’s so 2004! I’ve moved on to real death squad action!

    Posted by  on  01/11  at  02:43 AM

  11. Colin Powell & soldiers gone wrong & no mention of his role in the My Lai coverup?  Surprised.

    Posted by  on  01/11  at  05:18 PM

  12. It turns out that Charles Graner was solely responsible for My Lai.  Lt. Calley was framed.

    Posted by Michael  on  01/11  at  06:21 PM

  13. Right now I’m too zombified after an insane day at work (the technical stuff involved in the manufacturing of printed words is not all that attractive a process, particularly under deadline) and the glass of wine necessary to recover my nerves after said day at work (I figure that whether they’re right about red wine being good for the old arteries and such, this is a win-win situation regardless: I don’t pace and gnash my teeth at stupidity, and stress reduction is also an important part of preventive health mantainance.)

    But I think the problem may be with your field, Michael.

    See, studying langauge is more abstract on one level - how *ought* these systems to go ideally, how does it all fit together? - like mathematics or astronomy; and on another level it’s too concrete, dealing with the actual wear and tear and breakages of language as instanciated in the real world - like a carpenter using math to figure out how to fix a settled, no longer-square building that needs a dormer added on.

    This may make the total irrationality of people who regard the primary world *as itself fiction,* and themselves the authors of it - as if indeed the characters of a play were to rebel and write out the author and the actors and the audience, destroying them with the eraser - too alien a thing to grasp and deal with, too protean a monster, the way that geologists don’t think about the problem of the people who really do believe the moon is made of cheese and how to cope with and refute them…

    You might find it helpful to think of the administration in the paradigm of the most vicious interdepartmental (and intradepartmental) rivalries, on a larger scale. Plus that they use language only in terms of “combat rhetoric,” either in jousts or in melees, regarding all the world as a game of Othello and the sole aim of everyone in it to flip over as many pieces to their side as possible in the shortest time.

    This helps one to steer between the Scylla of trying to reason with the objectively-irrational, and the Charybdis of thinking them crazy instead of just insane: there *is* an internal logic to it, but it isn’t following the rules of the reality-based.

    Of course, this may not make as much sense as it seems to, absent the warm glow of cheap paisano.

    --Then again, when they come out with things like: parents put toddlers on leashes, and cheerleaders put people in pyramids, therefore no one at Abu Ghreib engaged in torture, and you go from reading *this* at the BBC to reading Giblets explaining it all and Giblets makes way more sense…

    Posted by bellatrys  on  01/11  at  11:11 PM

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