American Father Tortures His Daughter

One of the most obnoxious features of American political discourse is the self-righteous tone American pundits often adopt. About how the U.S. is a moral leader and about how America’s political establishment is a model to behold. But these same pundits then go a call for preemptive wars in order to teach the Arabs a lesson in “force” (”the only language they understand”) and who defend an imperial presidency. These individuals have the temerity to criticize Russia’s invasion of Georgia - after that latter started the war - but defend the U.S. aggression against Iraq and threats against Syria and Iran.

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Tom Friedman is one of the biggest hypocrites in this regard:

Tom Friedman, The New York Times, today [11/29/2009]:

Major Hasan may have been mentally unbalanced — I assume anyone who shoots up innocent people is.

Tom Friedman, The Charlie Rose Show, May 30, 2003:

ROSE: Now that the war is over, and there’s some difficulty with the peace, was it worth doing?

FRIEDMAN: I think it was unquestionably worth doing, Charlie. I think that, looking back, I now certainly feel I understand more what the war was about . . . . What we needed to do was go over to that part of the world, I’m afraid, and burst that bubble. We needed to go over there basically, and take out a very big stick, right in the heart of that world, and burst that bubble. . . .

And what they needed to see was American boys and girls going from house to house, from Basra to Baghdad, and basically saying: which part of this sentence do you understand? You don’t think we care about our open society? . . . . Well, Suck. On. This. That, Charlie, was what this war was about.

We could have hit Saudi Arabia. It was part of that bubble. Could have hit Pakistan. We hit Iraq because we could. That’s the real truth.

Tom Friedman, NPR’s Talk of the Nation, September 23, 2003 (via NEXIS):

That’s what I believe ultimately this war was about. And guess what? People there got the message, OK, in the neighborhood. This is a rough neighborhood, and sometimes it takes a 2-by-4 across the side of the head to get that message.

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Tom Friedman can declare with a straight face that “anyone who shoots up innocent people is ... mentally imbalanced” without seeing how clearly that applies to himself and those who think like he does. It’s that self-absorbed disconnect — seeing Hasan’s murder of American soldiers as an act of consummate evil and sickness while refusing to see our own acts in a similar light — that shapes most of our warped political discourse. And note the morality on display here: Hasan attacks soldiers on a military base of a country that has spent the last decade screaming to the world that “we’re at war!!,” and that’s a deranged and evil act, while Friedman cheers for an unprovoked war that killed hundreds of thousands of innocent civilians and displaced millions more — all justified by sick power fantasies, lame Mafia dialogue, and cravings more appropriate for a porno film than a civilized foreign policy — and he’s the arbiter of Western reason and sanity.

And this nation that never stop lectures others on their human rights records and how they do not respect the rule of law, is home to a civilian population that is in love with torture and thinks that torture is nothing more than a fun T.V. show (i.e. “24″).

A new World Public Opinion poll found that a large majority of Americans support torture - higher than any other nation.

Although the U.S. political elites often deem Arabs and Muslims as inferior - only 36% of Iranians believe torture is sometimes justified. 43% believe it must be prohibited at all times. 66% of Palestinians and 54% of Egyptian share the view that torture is never justified. 80% of Europeans agree.

In contrast, 54% of Americans believe that torture is justified at least sometimes. Only 25% of American oppose torture at all times. So this ostensible “leader of the free world” is the biggest advocate of Medieval “justice.”

Americans need a good, long hard look at the people they have become, and stop sanctimoniously preaching to others.

“With these new numbers, it’s virtually impossible to find a country with as high a percentage of torture supporters as the U.S. has. In Iran, for instance, only 36% believe that torture can be justified in some cases, while 43% believe all torture must be strictly prohibited. Similarly, 66% of Palestinians, 54% of Egyptians, and over 80% of Western Europeans believe torture is always wrong. The U.S. has a far lower percentage than all of those nations of individuals who believe that torture should always be prohibited. At least on the level of the citizenry (as opposed to government), we’re basically the leading torture advocacy state in the world.”

Give such statistics, it should not surprise us if water-boarding becomes mainstream in America:

A 27-year-old Washington state soldier allegedly admitted Sunday to having held his daughter's head in a bowl of water because she couldn't recite the alphabet.

The term water-boarding has become so mundane in American politics that politicians now causally support it without appreciating what they are endorsing. Not only do they support it, but make it a question of bravado and high honor that they are advocates for torture and believe that constitutional enumerated rights should not apply for suspected terrorists - take the case of that Massachusetts new senator Scott Brown. But then I do not believe that a man who signs off with "I drive a truck!" is capable of in-depth thinking.

And thus given our abysmal political and popular culture, it is not surprising that Americans either endorse torture or are too casually indifferent to the fact that their nation engaged in water-boarding and other acts of inhumane torture. And some may get idea in a 'freak show' nation as George Carlin put it.