Some People Just Don’t Get It
Trying out a new look on Peevish, Anne’s post, Patriotism, points to the brouhaha that a cartoon by David Horsey has generated.
Apparently the fact that there are documented instances of torture by the US should never be mentioned or alluded to by anyone claiming to be an American. This is along the lines of the mind set that feels there would be no deaths in Iraq if Gary Trudeau and ABC Nightline don’t mention them.
These are the people that claim that Newsweek is an “enemy of the people” because none of the five instances of abuse of the Quran that the Pentagon admits to involves a flush toilet. The Pentagon doesn’t say if any of them involve a “slops bucket”, but that wasn’t the specific claim made.
When government spokesweasels start picking their words with extreme care, it is time for follow-up questions because what they are denying is true in every particular except one small point. When a spokesweasel says “the victim wasn’t run over by a tank from the 117th Armored Regiment”, it means that the tank was probably from another unit, not that the victim wasn’t run over by a tank.
After years of reading Soviet propaganda, I am all too familiar with this technique for lying with facts. Most are old enough to remember that immortal line: “that depends on what the definition of ‘is’ is”.
