Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity finally snapped last week (in unison, predictably) and declared that the pictures of prisoner abuse in Iraq – which even Karl Rove concedes have set the Arab world’s view of the US back “decades” – were nothing more than a little light-hearted fun.
Said Limbaugh, “This is no different than what happens at the Skull and Bones initiation, and we’re going to ruin people’s lives over it… These were just boys and girls blowing off steam during a stressful situation. Let’s not make an international incident out of it, for crying out loud.” A guest on Hannity and Colmes said that the pictures were no worse than a frat hazing. “So in other words, this is not a big deal?” replied Sean. (Hannity had already compared the prisoner abuse to frat hazing on his radio show earlier in the week.)
Now, I don’t know if it’s escaped Rush and Sean’s attention, but generally speaking frat members don’t go around pulling random people off the street and hazing them against their will. Come to that, how can these two giants of morality look at the pictures and even try to make excuses? I wonder… if Iraqi soldiers took Sean and Rush away from their families, put them in a jail cell, stripped them naked, put hoods over their heads, forced to simulate oral sex on their fellow inmates, put a leash around their necks and dragged them around on all fours, piled them up in a heap of other naked inmates, and beat the shit out of them – would they still consider it to be “not a big deal?”