Humiliation Hullabaloo
Joan Swirsky
Monday, May. 10, 2004
Let me see if I’ve got this straight. Six or 10 bad apples – out of five-football-field’s worth of barrels jam-packed with about 200,000 shining apples – went bad, the proof in a number of graphic photos showing them teeming with worms and rotten to the core.
Poll 10 people or a million people about this kind of aberration in an amazingly vital crop of apples and I bet their response would be: “A fluke!”
Which was exactly what the actions of those few bad apples in the American military turned out to be when their rottenness was exposed as they “guarded” their captives in the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq.
Frankly, this so-called scandal leaves me the opposite of outraged but rather quite awed by the actions of the 200,000 U.S. armed forces that have waged and are waging valiant battles – and adhering to impossibly high ethical standards – to delouse the tyrannical regimes in Afghanistan and Iraq and keep the terrorists dedicated to destroying us far from our shores.
But poll the anti-American leftists among us and it’s another story. For them, nothing short of an orgiastic apologia and some figurative beheadings of those in power will do.
New York Sen. Hillary Clinton was among the first to turn her jaundiced eye away from those 200,000 good apples in an interview with CNN’s Wolf Blitzer.
"The bottom line,” she said in her typically condescending way, “is that leadership has to be responsible and held accountable … that goes all the way up the chain of command.” Forget about her own bountiful “forgiveness” and the “understanding” she expected of the American people when her husband lied repeatedly for over a year to her, the Congress and the entire international community.
When Blitzer reminded her that extreme practices have been used throughout history to extract information and confessions from our enemies, she said that the U.S. had to be careful not to treat Iraqi terrorist suspects “too harshly.” In other words, let’s not treat our enemies as enemies!
Then we heard from Democrat presidential candidate John Kerry, who, as usual, hedged his bets when it came to saying anything that normal people can interpret as a stance.
But Kerry, who recently reaffirmed to Tim Russert on “Meet the Press” that he engaged in war crimes far more vicious and deadly than the “humiliation” at Abu Ghraib – “…yes, yes… I took part in shootings in free-fire zones…conducted harassment and interdiction fire…used 50-caliber machine guns against people…took part in the burning of villages… all of this is contrary to the laws of warfare…[and] the Geneva Conventions....” – had the chutzpah to call for the resignation of Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld.
Today, Afghanistan is free of the Taliban and most of Al Qaeda’s leadership and Iraq is free of its murderous leader and his murderous sons, of mass graves and rape rooms, of fear in the hearts of most of its citizens, save those in the areas where terrorists are making their last stand. And the country is up and running – electricity, food, schools, hospitals, an interim government, etc.
But Kerry wants the man responsible for all this progress to resign over the excesses of a few military cretins and the yet-to-be-identified superiors who gave them their orders!
Then there is the leftist American media, blaring provocative headlines loaded with inflammatory adjectives, and, from the networks and CNN, blanket coverage complete with finger-wagging preachments in which both anchors and talking heads can barely conceal their glee at having arrived at what they hope is the ultimate “Gotcha” in a get-Bush season.
What the media have studiously ignored, however, is that they have known since mid-January of these charges, that Sec. Rumsfeld immediately briefed the president, and that court marshals were issued and investigations begun. And they knew that the photos he withheld were to avoid compromising the investigations already being conducted.
Hypocrites all!
Where was the media outrage when, last week, Palestinian terrorists murdered a pregnant woman and her four young daughters in cold blood, or when 20 Marines were murdered in Iraq along with four American support workers who were incinerated in their car and others strung up over a bridge by the same people they are now warning us not to be too harsh against?
Where were their photos of those grotesque events? And where were the voices in the Arab world expressing revulsion and regret and vowing to bring the perpetrators to justice?
They were nowhere because the media and the leftists they carry water for don’t give a damn about defending America! To my mind, they hate America!
They remind me of the scorpion that convinces an eagle carrying her baby to fly him across a river. He promises not to harm the eaglet, but promptly upon landing devours the young bird. “How could you do that?” the eagle screams in horror. “That’s what scorpions do!” the rapacious beast responds.
And what leftists do – routinely, reflexively, blindly and to their everlasting shame – is take every opportunity to blame America first and, of course, to hate the administration under which those few bad apples exercised their own brand of anti-Americanism.
To his immense credit, the head of that administration, President Bush, went on Arab TV to say that the acts of those few bad apples were not what America is all about. In plain-spoken language and with persuasive sincerity, he expressed the feelings and beliefs of most Americans who revere our military and are embarrassed by the actions of what amounts to the aggression of a few schoolyard bullies or hazing by some pot-addled frat boys.
But the scorpions on the left, determined to undermine the president at every turn, were not through. Sen. Ted Kennedy and other screeching partisans went so far as to suggest that we raze the prison, a “symbol” they said of Saddam Hussein’s torture chambers, which in their overreaction and melodrama they now shamefully and erroneously equate with a “symbol” of American malevolence and barbarity. As if dismantling the bridge at Chappaquidick would erase the memory of a drowning Mary Jo Kopechne!
Kennedy and the rest of the anti-humiliation crowd have shown a striking lack of historical perspective in blaming the president and his cabinet for the sins of a few out-of-control soldiers. But that’s because history for them began four years ago in Florida when those so-called disenfranchised voters who ordinarily pride themselves on intelligence and literacy.
Isn’t it interesting that the day in modern history that angered conservatives the most was September 11, 2001, but the day that continues to anger liberals the most is November 7, 2000!
Since then, Democrats have been on a protracted and hysterical mission to discredit every initiative, every appointment, every breath the president takes, only grudgingly breaking from their “this’ll get him” plan for a few weeks after September 11. Even then, however, they were trying to figure out how best to undermine him.
They launched several presidential candidates that resulted in the presumptive nominee, an uninspiring Kerry who, to this day, has offered not one original program or policy but adheres slavishly to the only monotonous lyrics he seems to know: “Call in the U.N.!”
"The President of the United States needs to offer the world an explanation and needs to take appropriate responsibility," Kerry said, for the “horrifying abuse of Iraqi prisoners…”
But wait a minute! Only last week, two dozen Vietnam veterans – 19 of 23 who served with or commanded Kerry, and who he subsequently humiliated by accusing them of “war crimes” – publicly questioned the candidate’s self-glorifying but, they said, deeply dishonest account of his war record, also casting grave doubt on his fitness to become the next Commander in Chief.
Now there’s a story worth pursuing, but not to the leftwing media! Did you read it or hear it? I didn’t.
Rather, the Democrats and their ideological cheerleaders in the media continue to hope that the Abu Ghraib “scandal” will be the big gotcha that will topple the Bush presidency.
But, in spite of their nostalgia for the good old days of Vietnam – when they vilified the military and cast the good guys as bad and the bad guys as good – they haven’t succeeded in turning the American public against the president’s noble and heroic mission to democratize the middle east and rid the world forever of the Islamic terrorists who have wreaked havoc in that region for thousands of years, and today are targeting the entire western world.
They carried on for months about the “failing” economy until employment zoomed upward, the latest numbers showing its largest rise in 20 years. That didn’t work.
They salivated in anticipation of the president’s undoing as author after author published anti-Bush books and were rewarded by a blitz of media exposure. That also didn’t work.
Then they waited for the ax to fall on the president during the 9/11 Commission hearings, when a panel stocked with undisguised partisans tried to convince the public that eight years of the Clinton administration’s slashed military and intelligence budgets had nothing to do with September 11 but that less-than-eight-months of Bush’s leadership was the real culprit. That failed as well.
Now we have the humiliation hullabaloo in which the frantic left is trying to perpetrate a huge deception on the public by pretending that the unfortunate incidents at Abu Ghraib alienated “our friends” in the Arab world. The same friends by the way, who danced in the streets when 3,000 Americans died and, to this day, have never ever issued even a semblance of an apology for the implication of their countries in the September 11 disaster.
With friends like this…
The latest pretext to depose the president won’t work either. Under his leadership, the perpetrators are being investigated and will be brought to justice.
But the Democrats – stuck in the past and incapable of acknowledging that we live in a new world with new threats and a president who has had the foresight and boldness to innovate the only new strategies to combat terrorism in the last 50 years – will be forced to look under yet another rock to find the worms they have been infesting our country with for the last almost-four years. That won’t work either. |
