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Pour Me Another Beer, Chester, and I'll Tell You the One About Newsweek

It appears that there might be a half-life for Kool-Aid after all. John Cole, a conservative blogger over at Balloon Juice, on the new FBI memos regarding the flushing of the Koran:

To be brutally honest, it wouldn't really bother me if they flushed the Koran, as the book is essentially meaningless to me. I guess part of me would say- "Gee, you shouldn't really do that, because many will see it as really offensive," but that is about it.

That isn't the way we decided to fuck this football, though. Wiser heads than mine, or at the very least, people in a position to make these decisions, chose to approach the whole Islam issue from a standpoint of extreme sensitivity. We said, from day one, that we wouldn't violate any of these rules we had just created for religious tolerance and respect for Islamic rituals and artifacts....

Right now, the overwhelming evidence is that some sort of this was and may be still going on, and it doesn't offend me that it is happening so much out of the fact that they are doing it (the alleged and actual acts of Koran and religious abuses- not the torture. The torture infurtiates me.), but the fact that we said we would not be doing it and yet it appears to be happening anyway. In other words, we set up the rules and then went ahead and broke them.

Many of you still wish to cling to the idea that it never in any way, shape, or form, occurred. That just doesn't fit the overwhelming evidence that some religious-type abuses did occur. That means we would have to disbelieve all of the following:

1.) The detainees and their lawyers
2.) Military personnel themselves
3.) FBI reports and experiences
4.) The ACLU
5.) The International Red Cross
6.) Amnesty International

(snip)

And yes, I know the track records of all of those organizations, particularly the last three. I know that International Red Cross ambulances have been used by murderers and bomb smugglers in Israel. But, at some point, even if you have 400 known liars gathered together, when they all have the same damned story to tell, only a fool would dismiss their claims.

(snip)

I guess that means we need a talking points update:

1.) Newsweek Lied, People Died!
2.) The media hates the military.
3.) Why are they using anonymous sources?
4.) 1.) Why is the media recycling old stories?
5.) 2.) You can't trust those terrorists.
6.) 3.) Even if it is true, you shouldn't publish it- we are at war.
7.) 4.) You can't trust Newsweek and the Washington Post Reuters.
5.) What about the children?

Now if we could just get it out of the water cooler at Connected. I'm thinking of starting a Free Monica campaign.

(via Mahablog)

posted by Jane Hamsher @ 5/26/2005 09:24:00 AM