Firestarter

Whatever. I say we put the next lot of prisoners on live TV and make them say "Hi, I'm a scum-sucking ex-Moslem terrorist from Abu Shithole-as-Salaam, and I don't deserve to live. Praise Jehovah!" Then force-feed them rashers of bacon, make them give each other blowjobs, and have a female Marine shoot each pair in the head/groin with a single high-explosive round. Hey, no sense in wasting perfectly good ammunition.

Bloody hysterical.

H'm.

I don't wear much YSL either (apart from that one beaded dress); most of my clothes are Armani or Hugo Boss. Yes, I wear mostly (specially tailored and fitted) men's clothes. No, they don't look masculine on me. This segment of Marney's Wardrobe (marketing wouldn't let us call it The Closet) is over. We now return you to your regular schedule. NB. Please see italicised boldface in this post.

If. Then, yes. Thing is, I haven't seen these photos, and I doubt Mike has either. So I'm not talking about them, and I presume Mike isn't talking about them. We're talking about what we have seen. And that, as both of us have said, repeatedly, is nothing more than humiliation. And neither of us has much of a problem with that. No. It's assault and battery and sadistic torture, and it should be a capital offense. And no, it doesn't make any difference to me if the victim is an innocent American or a would-be Iraqi suicide bomber (or whatever). The identity and character of the victim is immaterial in such a crime. Thing is, no one's ever denied that. The allegations of rape and murder are, right now, just allegations. Serious allegations to be sure, but not proof positive. And if they turn out to be true, no American will defend or excuse the soldiers convicted of such disgusting crimes. But until it's proven one way or the other, kindly refrain from assuming that it has been, and then trying to claim points for your unproven assumptions.

Victor Davis Hanson, writing in the National Review, sums up most of my feelings on this matter. Newt Gingrich, writing in the Wall Street Journal, refutes Hanson's thoughts on the "apologies" so shrilly demanded and so unfortunately given - the only thing he said that I really disagreed with. Perhaps an apology is necessary. But the American people are the ones who deserve it, for being misrepresented and left open to such ridiculous criticism and demagoguery. Not our enemies.

Apparently I'm a carcinogenic chick magnet who loves to conquer clits. Huh. Who knew?

Thanks.

Yes they are. They are not POWs. They are illegal enemy combatants and terrorists. No they aren't. Soldiers do not carry out deliberate attacks on civilian targets and soldiers are answerable to a state authority. This might be correct if indeed they did treat American troops in such a manner. However, they do not. They murder and burn our troops and civilians indiscriminately, mutilate and dismember the charred bodies, and then hang the shattered remains on bridges to glory in their display. Incorrect. They are subhuman monkeys. Yes they do. No they don't. They deserve to be treated far, far worse. But, unfortunately, we're too nice to do the right thing. Good.

Essentially, what I was trying to get across was that I don't really care if we're mean to the terrorists. I don't care if we hurt their little feelings, I don't care if we make their families hate us even more, and I don't care if we offend their religious sensibilities. In fact I'm all for it. If the further allegations of torture (sexual and otherwise) and murder prove to be true, then I'll support any prosecution of the responsible soldiers. There's no excuse for that sort of thing, no matter what. But simple humiliation (which is all I've seen so far) and a couple of stupid snapshots? No. Maybe withhold a month's pay at most. What annoys me the most is that these incidents (again, as far as we know at this time) are isolated rather than systemic, insignificant rather than grave, and few rather than many. Nevertheless, the foreigners and our own press are almost exuberantly portraying them as exactly the opposite in every respect, as if they're on the level of the goddamn Holocaust. The inflated, grandiose pomposity of calling the "shaming" of terrorists (and I consider every last person in Iraq who attacks our soldiers to be a terrorist by definition) an "atrocity" - that truly beggars the imagination. The "apologies" were unnecessary, unwise, and undeserved. Look. I'm sick of the fucking Moslems. Just thinking about them makes me feel physically ill. I don't care if their culture places women just a notch below dogs, and as a result they consider the fact that a female soldier humiliated the male terrorists a mortal insult. I don't give a flying fuck. I'm tired of hearing about their evil culture. I'm tired of hearing about their sick, twisted religion. I'm tired of listening to the crap about cultural sensitivity. They've done much worse and they've gloried in it, and I refuse to have our people judged by such disgusting subhuman filth under any circumstances. I'm tired of all the goddamn liberals and the snivelling Europeans demanding that we be nice to terrorists who want to kill us, and then claiming we're worse than terrorists ourselves on the rare occasions when we're mean. I'm tired of the hypocrisy and the whining and the bullshit. Send every last one to hell and be done with it.

Sure, I haven't had any cookies today and I'm having a hard time sleeping. I'd like a glass of warm milk too while you're up. I don't wear anything from Gucci anymore. Long story. "Have." At least she gets her verbs right. But no, I was thinking of From This Moment and You're Still The One.

That made me laugh. Earth to JotW: We don't lose even one single American life in actual fighting. We lose them in ambushes and suicide attacks - not situations when the enemy might possibly surrender. Our soldiers are the best in the world, and they rarely suffer even minor injuries when these cowardly scum are forced into a stand-up fight.

Yeah, no kidding. If I were at Fox I wouldn't brag about having stolen van Susteren either. What, they think she's a great catch or something? After all that plastic surgery only one side of her mouth is capable of movement.

Fine. Saves us paperwork.

Textbook perfect set of pearly-whites (well, okay, slightly coffee-stained) here, thanks. Finishing my doctoral thesis in a year or so. So if anyone lives in a rural area she's automatically ignorant, inbred, and unemployed. I see. Well, I'm about 5 minutes out of DC, I have a six-figure salary and almost half a million dollars in gold and biotechnology stocks, so that doesn't really apply, but I'll be sure to convey this to my aunt Sarah next time I see her - the one who lives just south of Baton Rouge in a 61 room mansion. Anyway, next. Because as we know, half the country is illiterate and racist. I love the way you "progressives" can't understand that the South has actually changed over the past 100 years. I'm wearing silk pyjamas from Ralph Lauren right now. Sorry to disappoint you. As opposed to a pro-terrorist rally? Rarely. I don't like country music on the whole although some of Shania Twain's pop is pretty good. I listen to Darryl Worley's Have You Forgotten and Alan Jackson's Where Were You When the World Stopped Turning? from time to time, though. Yeah, I say that pretty often. Nope. I don't forget why America is the greatest country on the face of the earth. I don't forget how we went into Iraq or why we're there, either.

Napalm, maybe?

Oh goodie.

Humiliating evil people isn't barbaric. We've done it before and we'll do it again. The soldiers who set up and took those photographs deserve decorations, not court-martials. And the next time we do this, let's televise it live.

Gotta agree with every word in those two letters. Sorry, JotW - I know you were trying to make the authors look dumb, but all you accomplished was to make them look right. Terrorists were humiliated, boo frickin' hoo. Now shoot them, put the next bunch on dog leashes as well, and shoot them too. Throw them in the emptied mass graves they used to dump other people in and fill it up with the rest of that godforsaken country's human sewage, so the decent Iraqis can get on with their lives and our soldiers can come home.

Indeed. Even the right-wing pundits are getting all teary-eyed over this storm in a teacup. "Unjustifiable... shameful... terrible tragedy... atrocity." Atrocity? This isn't an atrocity. The Bataan Death March was an atrocity. 9/11 was an atrocity. The Iran-Iraq war was an atrocity, and oh yes, the genocide of the Kurds was an atrocity. This is not. This isn't even important enough to warrant more than one and a half column inches over two days. Arab terrorists were "shamed" and "dishonoured?" Good work well done, let's move on.

Well now, that's a step up from the way you treat your women, isn't it? Be grateful.

The fact that we'd like to liberate them - and not only from external oppression - doesn't mean we have to listen to their hypocritically indignant whining even as they continue to harbour terrorist filth. And quite frankly, I'm not going to take moral lessons from people who strangle their daughters with copper wire for the "crime" of being kidnapped and raped, or let them burn to death in a blazing building if their ankles might show in public. We're better than the Arabs and until they're ready to apologise for century upon century of torture, tyranny, enslavement, brutalisation, and genocide, I don't see any need to get too worked up over a couple of stupid photos. Whatever their validity might be.

I'd just like to point out at this time that my ancestry is partially Arab. And yeah. Fuck 'em.

He pitched a strike in the World Series. Shut it.

Dido, White Flag "I'll let it pass and hold my tongue, and you will think that I've moved on..."