GULAG? GULAG? GAG ME

Like with Sebastian Holsclaw’s greatly lauded and utterly vapid essay, Bird’s post appears to address a situation in some alternate universe where republicans have not been in charge of the government at every single stage of this long-standing torture saga, where every single person involved in drafting the Administration’s torture policies is not a Bush appointee serving at the pleasure of President Bush, and where a archipelago of illegal torture facilities is somehow explained by some unfortunate catalatic confluence of bad apples. And like Holsclaw, he makes a great show of his broad-minded acceptance of facts that have been obvious to normal people for a year. However, unlike Holsclaw, Bird quite clearly doesn’t particularly care that his government has set up the greatest challenge to liberal human rights since the Soviet Union. The only identifiable villians I can find in Bird’s piece are Amnesty International and liberals, and the only people who appear to deserve any sympathy are President Bush and his Republican supporters, who are suffering politically from the policies they themselves have created and supported. And his proposal for dealing with the issue is to have President Bush set up a commission to investigate what the people who he is ultimately responsible for directing and managing are doing, in order to “remov [e] the appearance” that there is something wrong. The reason for this is that Charles Bird is a coward, a fool, a supporter of torture, and a moral imbecile of the sort which seems to think that there is no greater calling than being a Bush apparatchik. I quote:

We need to address this issue better. Why? First, because our mistreatment of prisoners/detainees is wrong. Second and less importantly, because it’s bad politics. We’re suffering damage by thousands of small political cuts, seemingly daily. By insufficiently addressing the problem, we are exposed politically and it opens the door to outrageous charges and overexaggerations and dissembling made by our detractors, both domestic and international. The anti-Bush crowd has seized the issue and they’re not going to let go. The liberal agenda is to damage, neutralize or impeach Bush. Why give the left this kind of ammunition?

This is a long piece over at The Poor Man, but well worth the read.