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Wednesday, May 12, 2004

Getcha red hot outrage

Well, it took them two weeks, but it looks like the wingnuts have gotten their act together on Abu Ghraib.  Unable to stem worldwide outrage at the atrocities by belittling them and/or blaming them on (a) a few rogue elements (b) women (c) gays in the military, they’ve decided to out-outrage the outrage by flooding the outrage zone.  Thus the hideous James Inhofe (R, what else-- OK):

“I’m probably not the only one up at this table that is more outraged by the outrage than we are by the treatment,” the Oklahoma Republican said at a U.S. Senate hearing probing the scandal.

These prisoners, you know they’re not there for traffic violations,” Inhofe said. “If they’re in cellblock 1-A or 1-B, these prisoners, they’re murderers, they’re terrorists, they’re insurgents. Many of them probably have American blood on their hands and here we’re so concerned about the treatment of those individuals.”

Yep, there’s no question that people protesting atrocities are way worse than the atrocities themselves.  But look at the bizarrely recursive position in which this puts protestors:  what are we going to say now?  How about “I’m probably not the only one in the country that is almost as outraged by the outrage about the outrage as I am about the treatment”?

Besides, liberals and progressives don’t get to express outrage at outrageous things.  Inhofe:  “I am also outraged that we have so many humanitarian do-gooders right now crawling all over these prisons looking for human rights violations, while our troops, our heroes are fighting and dying.” In the hypothetical Sane Universe (still only a figment of certain astrophysicists’ imaginations), remarks like these would appear only in the Weekly World News under Ed Anger’s byline:  “I’m madder than a bloviating pusbag on an Oxycon binge about all these wacko humanitarians trying to keep our troops from blowing off a little steam.” (And what’s this about humanitarians crawling all over these prisons?  Last I looked, it actually wasn’t the humanitarians who were doing the crawling.)

At least this explains wingnuts’ hostility to reports like these from the crawling do-gooders over there at the International Committee of the Red Cross.  (International?  Red?  Isn’t this some sort of Communist front?) We now know that (as the Red Cross puts it) “between 70 percent and 90 percent of the persons deprived of their liberty in Iraq had been arrested by mistake.” Next we’re going to find out that 20 to 30 percent of them were, in fact, arrested for traffic violations, at which point Inhofe is going to be more outraged by the outrage in response to the outrage about the outrage than by the arrests themselves.

And now comes the beheading of Nick Berg—like the beheading of Daniel Pearl over two years ago, a medieval atrocity caught on video.  Apparently the wingnuts are utterly outraged by this, and even more outraged at the lack of liberal outrage, and even more outraged at liberal outrage about Abu Ghraib, since now, obviously, everything we do to torture and kill random A-rabs is A-OK.  Of course Max is right about this—there’s no one to complain to:

If I could, I would write a letter of protest to the U.S. Department of Beheading Facilitators, but of course there is no such place. There is nobody for me to appeal to who is beholden to me in any way, has a conscience, or has some responsibility for this heinous crime.

Even still, I’m outraged.  But then, I’ve been outraged by al-Qaeda for six years now.  I was against them before, and I’m against them now.  That’s why I supported war in Afghanistan even though it was conducted by this corrupt and incompetent administration:  I didn’t think we had the luxury of waiting until 2005 or 2009 to destroy the Taliban’s terror training camps.  And I think the day that these ultrareligious patriarchal thugs vanish from the globe—together with all the other ultrareligious patriarchal thugs I know—will be a very good day.

Until then, I’m going to continue to be outraged that Bush and company abandoned a legitimate fight in Afghanistan for the neocon FantasyLand in Iraq—thereby allowing al-Qaeda to regroup and open new recruiting branches in Fallujah, Tikrit, Basra, and in the new West Baghdad Insurgency Mall.

Kos says it better than it can be said in any known tongue.

And let’s take a moment of silence to reflect on the fact that the Bush administration could have taken out Abu Musab Zarqawi, well before their invasion of Iraq, but decided to give him a pass while they concocted their harebrained schemes for how to deal with all the roses with which our troops would be greeted.

There’s your Nick Berg outrage for you.  We mourn for his family and friends, and for everyone—that’s everyone—who has died or been maimed in this catastrophe.

Posted by Michael on 05/12 at 01:54 AM
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