Homocon

Speaking of ouch, I'm always surprised at a liberal blogger's rush to suspect the worst of our military when representatives for terrorist detainees cry "torture" and "mistreatment", especially when there are no witnesses of the mistreatment, and no corroboration of the charges. Yesterday it was the Koran flushed down a toilet, today it's the alleged forced insertion and subsequent yanky-yank on "dirty" feeding tubes, without lubricants or anesthetics, for detainees who've gone on a hunger strike. The blogger (Rachel Neumann, the "Rights & Liberties" Editor at Alternet, of course) even chides the American media for not being compassionate enough to the plight of the detainees (if you can believe it): "For more than three months, 200 detainees at Guantanmo Bay have been on a hunger strike to draw attention to their mistreatment. But they were perhaps overestimating the compassion of the American media, as their strike has gotten very little press and generated even less concern."

Shhh, quiet -- I'm attempting to imagine a world where our media doesn't care more about the feelings and well-being of Rachel's poor put-upon terrorists than about Americans themselves, especially Americans who voted for George Bush (or, as Jane Smiley might call them, "The Unteachably Ignorant Red Staters").

Despite the fact that military medical personnel (who are the same doctors with the same education and skill set as the kind that civilians like you and I see on a regular basis) adamantly deny the accusations of mistreatment of terrorist detainees, stating that each detainee receives the same quality medical treatment as anyone else in a Naval hospital, it's the terrorist detainees that an anti-war blogger believes rather than our own doctors -- because, well, Bush is Hitler, which must only mean that our military medical staff has to be Mengele.

*rolls eyes*

Even M*A*S*H, a 70's era holdover of a television show that was highly critical of the Korean War effort, and war in general, didn't attempt to portray our own military doctors as cruel and barbarous sadists, bent on torturing and harming the declared enemy.

But it's the 21st century, and Alan Alda has completed his transformation into Howard Dean.

Amnesty International is also in on the act (not that anyone is surprised), complaining that the U.S. is violating the hunger-striking detainees' rights because we're keeping them alive -- "force feeding" them through tubes in the nose. Force feeding. It sound so brutal when you put it that way, but "force feeding" is called "nasogastric tube feeding" when described by non-hysterical, non-raving, apolitical medical personnel, and it's a procedure that's used on children, the elderly, cancer victims and even sick pets. It's exactly the same procedure that was used to keep Terry Shiavo alive for years, and yet no one seemed to consider it torture in her case.

So why is nasogastric tube feeding considered torture in a Guantanamo medical facility, and yet standard medical procedure administered to keep children suffering from cancer from starving to death in an American hospital? Oh, right, because in this case it's administered to a terrorist by a military doctor during the Bush Administration.

Silly me, sometimes I forget the nuances . . .

Oh, and there's also "startling new allegations" (not evidence or proof, mind you, just allegations) of sex torture at Guantanamo, too. Perhaps they made them watch old Teletubbie videos?

ADDENDUM:

Funny, on the way to work this morning I heard G. Gordon Liddy discussing how conservatives can best get the Miers nomination withdrawn while saving face for the Bush Administration . . . this Harriet Miers stuff is almost funny, if it weren't so weirdly divisive.

Less than moderate conservatives have jumped all over the "Not One Of Us" bandwagon with this issue, directing their criticism towards both Miers and the President. Personally, I voted for the President because I agree with his philosophy about bringing long-overdue democracy to the Middle East, not because I thought he was an ideological conservative. And I always assumed that President Bush was re-elected precisely because he came across as sincerely in-touch with the majority of voters rather than as some die-hard right-winger locked up in notions of political purity (and you know who you are).

Come 2008, who do these "right of the righties" think is going to be nominated by the Republican Party for President -- Bill Frist? I don't think so. We'll get either a Giuliani or a McCain, both political moderates with their feet planted firmly in social realities. John Kerry lost the election not because Bush was wildly popular, but because he appealed to only one half of the voting population (just like Bush). Nobody wants another tight, divisive race, and I see the RNC leaning towards centrism the next go round.