As a follow-up to this post, check out the Powertools as they pile on Ware for pointing out that McCain is being completely dishonest about Iraq. Although forced to retract the earlier report that Ware had heckled McCain, Powerpaul tries to salvage the basic thrust of the report by noting that “Ware’s reporting itself constitutes heckling.” Nice save, Powerpaul. Nice save.

Update: Iraqi Merchants heckle John McCain!!! Ok, ok, not quite. But their pointing out that he’s lying itself constitutes heckling.

Read the first sentence of the post and then share a giggle with me about the ad that was randomly generated for it.

Gosh, that’s a steep cliff Cheney is saying we should jump from and I really don’t see how we could survive the fall onto all those jagged rocks – and yet, and yet he sounds so very resolute that he must be serious and if he’s serious I can only assume that we’ll be doing it, and that we’ll be right to do it . . . and I just hope everyone else has the good sense to join us.

Wingnutty goodness!

Bush actually said that the Plame leaker would be “taken care of,” not fired. Oooooooooh. Sneaky! I wonder if “taken care of” means “protected from the consequences of his actions”. Perhaps it means, “rewarded after the big, bad nasty Democrats unfairly jump all over him for vindictively jeopardizing national security.”

Good lord, that post has to be one of the saddest, most desperate pieces of nonsense I’ve seen in a very long time. Tom Maguire is wasting his very big brain.

“I [heart] Gitmo” t-shirts.

Via everyone’s favourite torture apologists.

I suppose you could say a lot about a piece of stupidity like this. I’ll just limit myself to a modest point: Notice that it doesn’t occur to the author of the piece that anyone held at Guantanamo, or anywhere else, might actually be innocent. In order to really work yourself into a lather about the deplorably soft treatment of detainees, it helps to pass over the fact that many detainees were captured on the flimsiest evidence, by people who are hardly infallible. Nor have they been given a proper chance to contest their captivity – a situation which raises an epistemological problem for us, as well as a question of procedural justice for them. So many of them are sure to be innocent. But whenever I cruise around the moronosphere I see people either completely passing over this point, or (very) briefly acknowledging it before going on to completely disregard it in the rest of the argument.

Just for the record, I wish that Amnesty International hadn’t used the word “gulag” recently in criticizing the U.S.’s detention and extraordinary rendition practices. It’s not a helpful comparison. It’s not crucial to the good work the organization does publicizing the truth. And it’s allowed apologists for torture to distract attention from the main issue.

A lot of liberal/left bloggers are busy now pointing out that most of the people making these points are apologists for the Bush administration. And so they are. Indeed, it is not hard to make fun of these raving fuckwits. But I am not a raving fuckwit (you have to imagine me saying this in a Nixon voice), and I hope that a quick perusal of my archives will establish that I’m not a supporter of the Bush administration. And yet I’m still pretty sure that using the word “gulag” was a mistake. It’s not the kind of mistake you’d want to devote a new cycle to, or that you’d want to make the focus of all the coverage of this issue. But I do think it is a mistake worth briefly acknowledging before we return to our regularly scheduled horror at what America has become, and is becoming.

Nathan asks some good questions.

Tim Lambert explains:

“Fisking” is a term bloggers use for especially lame posts.

This is standard fare at this point:

Restoring America’s moral authority

Yesterday, Army Spc. Charles Graner was sentenced to 10 years in prison by a military jury for his role in the 2003 Abu Ghraib torture of Iraqi prisoners. In what other nation would this happen? Of course this won’t stop the crazy Left and equally crazy paleocon Right from carting out Abu Ghraib as an example of the “natural consequences” of American empire, but it is worth noting that under the rule of law and through due process a torturer is duly and justly punished. In the old Iraq under Saddam Hussien, torture wasn’t punished, it was punishment. See the difference? Bush’s critics can’t. And that difference separates the countries that need regime change from the countries that make regime change a reality.

The hilarious thing, though, is that if I’m not mistaken these lines were written by a Canadian. Canada did in fact have a torture scandal a few years back, which even featured trophy pictures. Read all about it here. Here are some samples:
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Since the election, I’ve been reading more right wing blogs in an effort to figure those fellas out. Anyway, my favourite find so far is a blog called Power Line, which I think is giving me insights galore into the deep, dark psyches of right wingers in this country. Some choice posts: this fair and balanced comment on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, or this insightful look at who is really to blame for the disputed Ukrainian electoral results.

It looks like I caught them at the peak of their game too. Time Magazine just named them blog of the year. They also got praised by Lynne Cheney on television not so long ago. Congrats, guys, and keep up the good work!

Matt Welch has a nice (though fairly limited) round up of a few right wing responses to torture at Abu Ghraib and elsewhere.

David Adesnik refers to the recent attack on American troops in Mosul as a “terrorist attack.”

Given the goals of the (fragmented) insurgency (insurgencies?), the availability of alternatives to violent resistance, and the nature of the group claiming responsibility for the attack, I would say that the attack was awful, immoral, pointless and unjustified. But was it a terrorist attack? It’s true that the soldiers were in a mess hall, not on the field of combat. But as a tactic, how does this compare to the U.S. practice at Fallujah of forcing all military age males fleeing a war zone back into the war zone and then killing anything that moves, armed or not?

Is Adesnik working with a consistent definition of terrorism? Or is this a slip of the tongue? If it’s a slip of the tongue, is it a revealing slip of the tongue?

Update: A response to Eric the Unread’s criticisms is here.

Yes, dammit.