Dark Bilious Vapors

an excellent response to Andrew Sullivan's snivelling complaints about the Iraqi prisoner abuse case. Quoth Sully:

We're experiencing another bout of trans-Atlantic dissonance on Iraq. The only story in Europe and the Middle East right now are the images of some U.S. soldiers humiliating and mock-torturing some Iraqi prisoners in Abu Ghraib prison. The images are indeed revolting, appalling, and shameful. They are being used and will be used as further propaganda fodder to make democracy fail in Iraq and to neuter America's moral credibility.

What?

Unless "America's moral credibility" is taken as an a priori truth, immune to empirical evidence, how could the fact of abuse and torture of prisoners--indeed, according to Amnesty International, widespread abuse and torture--not be concrete, and additional, evidence of America's lack of moral credibility?

This is what is so sickening and scary about the American right these days, namely, that they take what is true and factual and demean and diminish it, preemptively, as "propangada" or "spin." The only propaganda in evidence during this display is Mr. Sullivan's. And what makes him more frightful than right-wing garbage mouths like Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity is that Mr. Sullivan has an audience among the putatively "educated" and "refined."

Len on 05.03.04 @ 01:30 PM CST