Category: Old Dish

“Your comments in the dish today claiming that Salon and other supposedly nonpartisan publications are no less blindly leftwing than the Weekly Standard is blindly rightwing happened to get posted just after I’d read Fred Barnes’ article “A Democratic Senate?” on weeklystandard.com. Reading Barnes’ article, I was struck by the fact that I couldn’t imagine a leftwing magazine publishing anything that sunny and fair about the political opposition’s strong slate of candidates. If there were a chance that a Democratic-controlled Senate was about to switch to the Republicans, snide essays about the moronic and evil Republican candidates (and the ignorant Midwestern electorate) would have flooded the usual venues. This is no doubt one of the reasons I and other gay and quasi-leftish thinkers still vote Republican quite often: the mainstream left is the domain of the braindead and those who argue in bad faith. Goofy arguments by conservative authors against gay marriage might disguise this somewhat, but it’s true.’ – more feedback on the Letters Page.

The sane person subbing for Eric Alterman has the following to say:

(I pause here to mention that cartoonist Ted Rall – who is to the American Left what goats are to ballet – has inflamed folks with a cartoon covering much the same ground that Gonzalez did, and has far less of an excuse for arrant nonsense than should be granted the latter.)

Good for him. Still no mention I can find on Salon, which has, alas, descended into pure, rank partisanship without even a fig-leaf of reason or even-handedness any more. That doesn’t make them any worse than, say, National Review Online or the Weekly Standard, but it sure doesn’t make them any better. Nada on Tapped. But here’s one more. A little terse, but it exists!

“The more I learn about Pat Tillman and his family, and the more I think about the conversations lefties need to be having with thoughtful conservatives, the more pathetic Rall’s cartoon becomes. To him, taking the time to productively raise the issue of a soldier’s responsibility is apparently the same thing as “letting volunteer soldiers off the hook.” Whatever you say, Ted. Just one last question: When did you become such an idiot?” – principled, lefty blogger, Todd Morgan. If you find more serious, sane left-liberal or liberal condemnations of Rall, please send them in. I’m eager to show that the left can be as stringent with its own haters as it should be.

“This is no different than what happens at the skull and bones initiation and we’re going to ruin people’s lives over it and we’re going to hamper our military effort, and then we are going to really hammer them because they had a good time. You know, these people are being fired at every day. I’m talking about people having a good time, these people, you ever heard of emotional release? You of heard of need to blow some steam off?” – Rush Limbaugh, yesterday. (Hat tip: Wonkette.)

The full text of the military investigation is now online. Bottom line:

6.- (S) I find that the intentional abuse of detainees by military police personnel included the following acts:
a.- (S) Punching, slapping, and kicking detainees; jumping on their naked feet;
b.–(S) Videotaping and photographing naked male and female detainees;
c.- (S) Forcibly arranging detainees in various sexually explicit positions for photographing;
d.- (S) Forcing detainees to remove their clothing and keeping them naked for several days at a time;
e.- (S) Forcing naked male detainees to wear women’s underwear;
f.—(S) Forcing groups of male detainees to masturbate themselves while being photographed and videotaped;
g.- (S) Arranging naked male detainees in a pile and then jumping on them;
h.- (S) Positioning a naked detainee on a MRE Box, with a sandbag on his head, and attaching wires to his fingers, toes, and penis to simulate electric torture;
i.—(S) Writing “I am a Rapest”- (sic) on the leg of a detainee alleged to have forcibly raped a 15-year old fellow detainee, and then photographing him naked;
j.—(S) Placing a dog chain or strap around a naked detainee’s neck and having a female Soldier pose for a picture;
k.- (S) A male MP guard having sex with a female detainee;
l.– (S) Using military working dogs (without muzzles) to intimidate and frighten detainees, and in at least one case biting and severely injuring a detainee;
m. (S) Taking photographs of dead Iraqi detainees.

It renders one speechless.

What more can we do about this? Like most of you, I’ve had a hard time coming to grips with the appalling abuses perpetrated by some under U.S. command in, of all places, Abu Ghraib. We can make necessary distinctions between this abuse and the horrifying torture of Saddam’s rule, but they cannot obliterate the sickening feeling in the pit of the stomach. Those of us who believe in the moral necessity of this war should be, perhaps, the most offended. These goons have defiled something important and noble; they have wrought awful damage on Western prestige; they have tarnished the vast majority of servicemembers who do an amazing job; and they have done something incontrovertibly disgusting and wrong. By the same token, this has been – finally – exposed. We have a chance to show the Muslim and Arab world how a democracy deals with this. So far, the punishments meted out have not been severe enough; and the public apology not clear and definitive enough. It seems to me that some kind of reckoning has to be made by the president himself. No one below him can have the impact of a presidential statement of apology to the Iraqi and American people. Bush should give one. He should show true responsibility and remorse, which I have no doubt he feels. I can think of no better way than to go to Abu Ghraib itself, to witness the place where these abuses occurred and swear that the culprits will be punished and that it will not happen again. It would be a huge gesture. But frankly there is something tawdry about a president at a time like this campaigning in the Midwest in a bus. His entire war’s rationale has been called into question. The integrity of the United States has been indelibly harmed on his watch. He must account for it. Soon. And why not in Iraq?

The interesting thing about Ted Rall is that he reminds us of something we have forgotten – that a measurable swathe of the anti-Iraq war crowd were also against the war to topple the Taliban and uproot al Qaeda’s base of operations. In fact, opposition to the war in Afghanistan was intense in far left circles in early 2002. Rall is someone who craves and shouldn’t get more attention, but his views from an interview last year are revealing:

“My theory is that essentially, people don’t like to think they’re living in a country that’s led by an evil, dictatorial madman. But they are, they are living in Nazi Germany, in Stalinist Russia.”

And this:

“Bush’s whole tactic has been to throw so much shit at the wall in an average news cycle that potential political opponents have no idea how to react. In the end, what’s the issue here? Is it really war against Iraq? That’s an issue. But where were these same protesters for the war against Afghanistan, which was every bit as illegal and wrong-headed and immoral as the war against Iraq?”

Rall is a member of the Black Helicopter crowd on the far left. He does not represent most liberals, let alone most Democrats. But that offers them an opportunity to condemn him. Why has, say, Salon not weighed in? Why has Slate not barred his work permanently from their site? If National Review could can Coulter, the mainstream left can certainly can Rall. My bet is: they won’t. Nothing should be allowed to detract from the war against Bush. Not even elemental decency and taste.

“A strong culture permits diversity; a strong culture permits freedom of thought, deviation from the framework. When the Abbasid period was at its height, it became a culture of self-confidence. When there is confidence like this, you permit space and freedom. Lack of self-confidence leads to the lowest cultural point, from all aspects – human rights, women’s rights. In the Arab empire, there was more freedom than in the Arab world today.” – Salman Masalha, Israeli Arab intellectual and poet.

EMAIL OF THE DAY: “I’m afraid you have once again approached Muslim culture from an improper assumption. The issue of homosexuality and women’s issues has a certain quantum to do with patriarchal society; however, this is not the primary ideological thrust for the mindset of the people. The real issue is one dealing with private vs public space. Homosexuality has existed in the Muslim world since time immemorial, irrespective of Islam’s injunctions upon it. The humiliation experienced by the Iraqi prisoners at the hands of US troops, especially female soldiers, is a function of the fact that their nakedness was involuntarily exposed in a public realm. Discretion and modesty is still held at a very high premium in that part of the world.
The violation of these prisoners’ modesty is the key factor, tantamount to a woman being stripped of her clothing at a football game or some other public spectacle here. It is simply not done.
You can try to push the issue onto the Iraqi’s in typically Orientalist fashion, as if the only reason they have issue with the way they were treated is that they come from a backward, unenlightened culture, and that they should let the magnanimous white man (and woman) do to them whatever they wish because “white makes right.” Well, Andrew, formal colonialism is fortunately over; it would be a shame if you and your acolytes are trying to introduce its latest incarnation. The late Edward Said was correct in the title of one of his books, ‘Blaming the Victims.’ It seems that is what you wish to do as well.
The reason why these pictures will have a more deleterious impact in the Muslim world is because the Muslim world still holds sacred one’s own body and the ability to be free of exploitation, especially by so-called liberators. The Muslim world sees the current situation as being a Hobson’s choice: being a slave to Saddam or being made a whore by their ‘liberators.’ Neither appears to be too appealing.” – more feedback on the Letters Page.

Here’s what cartoonist Ted Rall has to say about the end of Taliban rule in Afghanistan and the removal of one of the worst mass-murderers in modern history, Saddam Hussein: “The word ‘hero’ has been bandied about a lot to refer to anyone killed in Afghanistan or Iraq. But anyone who voluntarily goes to Afghanistan or Iraq [as a soldier] is fighting for an evil cause under an evil commander in chief.” The United States’ intervention in Afghanistan was “an evil cause.” Good to know. I will believe the mainstream left that they do not share Rall’s views when they stop publishing him. But they won’t, will they?

The far right’s attempt to do to Catholicism what has been done to American Fundamentalism – turn it into a political wing of one party – is exemplified by Opus Dei supporter, Robert Novak, in yesterday’s Washington Post, and echoed by the National Review and the Weekly Standard, who also want to see a universal faith coopted by one faction in one political party. My response at TNR is now posted.

ON THE BRIGHT SIDE I: Shiites begin to get serious about running their own affairs in the South. The news this past week has indeed been gloomy, the retreat in Fallujah dispiriting, the Abu Ghraib images gut-wrenchingly awful. But I don’t believe that all is lost. The bottom line is that the Kurds want a new pluralist Iraq to work and have shown how in ten years in the north. the Shi’a have every reason not to see their country decsend ito civil war, since for the first time in decades they have a chance at exercizing real power. The danger is that Arab-Islamic cultural pathologies will overwhelm all of this. That was always the risk and it’s why, as George Will points out today, what we are witnessing is something truly historic and a test between the hopes of neoconservatism and the sobriety of conservatism. But my bet is that the truth is somewhere in between, and that, with time and commitment, real improvement can and will come to Iraq. Unlike others, I’m not giving up yet. Far from it. It’s at times like this that we have to grit our teeth and see this through.

ON THE BRIGHT SIDE II: Remember when Rhea County, Tennessee, wanted to sexually cleanse their county of homosexual vermin? They’re now going to get a fully-fledged “Gay Day” this year. The spirit of the freedom rides continues.