In other words: A discussion of The Bush Administration
It's the Porn, Stupid!
Good stuff from Frank Rich that echoes some earlier posts about Americans, torture, and George "Round and Round She Goes, Where the Buck Stops, Nobody Knows" Bush:
To blame every American transgression on the culture, whether the transgression is as grievous as Abu Ghraib or the shootings at Columbine or as trivial as lubricious teenage fashions, is to absolve Americans of any responsibility for anything. It used to be that liberals pinned all American sins on the military-industrial complex; now it's conservatives who pin them all on the Viacom-Time Warner complex. It used to be liberals that found criminals victims of "root causes"; now it's conservatives who find criminals victims of X-rated causes. Since it's conservatives who are now in power, we've reached the absurd state where we have an attorney general who arrived in Washington placing a higher priority on stamping out porn than terrorism; we have a Federal Communications Commission that is ready to sacrifice a bedrock American value (the First Amendment) to the cause of spanking Bono for using a four-letter word on TV. As Congress threatens to police cable TV as well, we face the prospect that the history in "Deadwood" may yet be airbrushed by the government until it resembles "Little Women."
All of this is at odds with one of President Bush's most persistent campaign themes. He has repeatedly vowed to introduce "a culture of responsibility in America" in which "each of us understands we are responsible for the decisions we make in life." Up to a point. Now he talks about how the Abu Ghraib pictures are not "the America I know." (Maybe he should get out more.) If he really practiced "a culture of responsibility" he would take responsibility for his own government's actions rather than plead ignorance and express dismay. He might, for instance, explain how his own White House counsel, Alberto Gonzales, came to write a January 2002 memo that labeled the Geneva Conventions "quaint" and "obsolete" for dealing with prisoners in the war on terrorism (of which Iraq, we're told, is a part). The dissemination of that memo's legal wisdom through the Defense Department and the military command over the past 26 months may tell us more about what led to Abu Ghraib than anything else we've heard so far from the administration, let alone any Heritage Foundation press release that finds the genesis of torture in the sexual innuendos of prime-time television.
In his speech last Monday night, the president, reeling in the polls and seeking a life raft, seemed to be well on his way to adopting the cultural defense being pushed by his political allies. He called Abu Ghraib a symbol of "death and torture" under Saddam Hussein and then said that the same prison also "became a symbol of disgraceful conduct by a few American troops." The idea, it seemed, was to concede American fallibility, if not exactly error. But by reducing the charge to "disgraceful conduct," he was performing a verbal sleight-of-hand that acquitted those troops of torture and found them guilty instead of the lesser crime of pornographic horseplay. (He was also trying to confine culpability to a "few" troops.) Perhaps he hopes that we will believe that what happened at Abu Ghraib is the work of just a handful of porn-addled freaks ....
Yeah, "A Few Good Men." Maybe the sequel should be "And Three Bad Apples." The idea being that if you spin the torture and murder of Iraqis fast enough, it really does begin to look like America -- the one from 1863. Here's an idea: Hang Jeff Davis!
- Michael 9:35 AM - [PermaLink] -
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