Say Anything Blog

Kathleen Parker feels that the actions of the soldiers in Abu Ghraib were the result of America's fascination with dick and fart jokes. No, I'm not kidding.

From Zwire.com:

When President Bush told the world that abuses at Abu Ghraib prison do not reflect American values, he was right. The best American values, in spirit if not always in practice, respect human life, dignity and the rule of law.

But some of what happened at Abu Ghraib, specifically the sexualized humiliations, may reflect American culture,especially in the instance of the naked human pyramid, which is nearly iconographic within the adolescent zeitgeist that spawned our current generation of soldiers.

The images from Abu Ghraib, now irreversibly tattooed on the Arab brain, were every frat-house cliché magnified. The human pyramid, males mooning, masturbation, bags over heads. What we saw, at least in part, was "The Farrelly Brothers Do Baghdad."

How else to explain the giddy photographs of young soldiers mugging for cameras and giving the thumbs-up sign beside humiliated prisoners, naked and masturbating? Another Farrelly movie, "Dumb and Dumber," comes to mind.

Why is there such a rush to blame this unfortunate incident on something? And its not contained to just one side of the political spectrum. Both sides have joined in.

Rush has been falling all over himself trying to explain the situation away the last couple of days. Democrats are, of course, blaming it on Bush and his administration. It seems like everyone like like to take this incident and use it to accomplish their personal political goals.

For the record, this conservative Republican isn't making any excuses. The people who committed those heinous acts in Abu Ghraib are responsible for what happened along with their supervisors and anybody who tried to cover it up. I don't think that goes as high up as Rumsfeld or Bush, but if it did I would want serious repercussions.

We have spent so much time trying to Iraqi's what it means to be free. We do not need them to look at this incident and get the idea that the new boss is no different from the old boss.