Culture, Minus the "-ure"

Bob Herbert "takes the gloves off" in exposing hypocrisy from Team Bush:

A photo of President Bush gingerly holding a month-old baby was on the front page of yesterday's New York Times. Mr. Bush is in the habit of telling us how precious he thinks life is, all life.

The story was about legislation concerning embryonic stem cell research, and it included a comment from Tom DeLay urging Americans to reject "the treacherous notion that while all human lives are sacred, some are more sacred than others."

Ahh, pretty words. Now I wonder when Mr. Bush and Mr. DeLay will find the time to address - or rather, to denounce - the depraved ways in which the United States has dealt with so many of the thousands of people (many of them completely innocent) who have been swept up in the so-called war on terror.

People have been murdered, tortured, rendered to foreign countries to be tortured at a distance, sexually violated, imprisoned without trial or in some cases simply made to "disappear" in an all-American version of a practice previously associated with brutal Latin American dictatorships. All of this has been done, of course, in the name of freedom...

Warfare, when absolutely unavoidable, is one thing. But it's a little difficult to understand how these kinds of profoundly dehumanizing practices - not to mention the physical torture we've heard so much about - could be enthusiastically embraced by a government headed by men who think all life is sacred. Either I'm missing something, or President Bush, Tom DeLay and their ilk are fashioning whole new zones of hypocrisy for Americans to inhabit...

The government, like an addict in denial, will not even admit that we have a problem.

"We're in this Orwellian situation," said Leonard Rubenstein, the executive director of Physicians for Human Rights, "where the statements by the administration, by the president, are unequivocal: that the United States does not participate in, or condone, torture. And yet it has engaged in legal interpretations and interrogation policies that undermine that absolutist stance."

Personally, I keep seeing the "not as bad as" defense being invoked, i.e., "well, we're not as bad as Saddam Hussein, etc."--indeed, Bush used to bring up "rape rooms," at least until stories surfaced about similar practices by troops and/or contractors. It's a sign of how low we've sunk when the best we can come up with is "not as bad" as someone who was a deranged mass murderer.

And unfortunately, we can't really say that, unlike nutjob bin Laden, we haven't killed any innocent people. In fact, deaths resulting from US actions occur quite frequently--I'd guess more or less daily, although you have to look to alternate sources for news of that sort.

Combined with torture as policy, it doesn't make for a pretty picture. Sadder still is how all this seems to be taken in stride by the citizenry. To paraphrase Edmund Burke, good people are doing nothing.