Since when is letting your staff screw up royally, breaking every rule in the book, and even some national and international laws in the process - oh, and, by the way, injuring and killing some other people - considered a superb job? I want that job in Bush’s cabinet. No, come to think of it, I don’t.
I don’t want Donald Rumsfeld’s job. Especially not in the coming weeks and months, as Congress systematically pulls apart at the President’s confidence the way his troops have systematically pulled apart at the world’s confidence in how we have been treating our prisoners of war. But I hope congress is up to the task of truly policing the group that perpetrated the heinous acts against those same POWs: Bush and His Cronies.
My father, with whom I had the pleasure of visiting over the weekend, told me, literally, that “none of them assholes apologized to us for 9/11, why should we treat them any better?” And that was understandable… it’s understandable because I have felt the same way… but we are Americans.
What, exactly, does that mean? “We are Americans”
It means that we are a proud, if sometimes foolish, people. We live free… we have few true, regulations put on us by our government… and we have the right to pick and choose how we live. Many people… most people… in the world don’t get to live in this freedom. But it - the freedom - comes with a huge price tag. That price tag is having the eyes of the world glued to us, watching for us to mess something up… and, unfortunately, it looks like we have.
Yes… it probably was a few bad apples, but it has given our opposition JUST enough straw to grasp on to to point at us and say: “See, they torture us just like the old regime.” “They treat us as if we were prisoners in our own country.” “They allow dogs to attack our people while they are nude and in prison, and can’t defend themselves.” Make no mistake, the barbarous treatment suffered at the hands of a few may, very well, be the downfall of the whole lot of soldiers, 135,000 of them, who risk their lives on a daily basis to bring peace to a country that has been war torn for the past year.
So… why should we treat them assholes any better when they haven’t apologized for what happened on 9/11?
Because it doesn’t matter. We walk a different path than they do. We know better, and know what true freedom tastes like. We believe that this is the way people should be allowed to live…
And because a few bad apples may spoil the bunch, we have to make sure that every apple that was touching those bad apples gets taken out of the barrel… straight to that last apple on top.
Yes - I firmly believe that what occurred in Iraq is a systematic “softening” of the prisoners. Yes, I believe that Donald Rumsfeld, George Bush, Dick Cheney, and Richard Meyer should ALL give up their jobs for this… it is the only way that we can truly go back to those Iraqis who have been wronged and say “Yes, we screwed up - and yes, you can rest assured it won’t happen again, because we’ve truly cleaned house.”
And the next time, make sure that we fix problems as soon as we know about them… and not just after the press hears about them.
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