They Can't Help Their Moral Equivalence

The family is still away while they finish their vacation, and I got home this morning too late for Fox News Sunday, so the only Sunday talk-show left was Face the Nation. I guess I shouldn't have been surprised (I'm talking about CBS after all), but I've generally thought of Bob Schieffer as one of the more balanced in the CBS stable (which isn't saying much at all, I admit). Today I'm convinced that CBS has no value what-so-ever.

On their Memorial Day show no less, Schieffer ended his show with a commentary linking Memorial Day, John McCain, and Gitmo.

Schieffer, CBS and the rest of the MSM (to include Hollywood) are currently all a-twitter about McCain's Faith of Our Fathers movie. I have the deepest respect for McCain's Vietnam performance. A couple of years ago, a co-worker asked me how I thought I might have done on the ground in Vietnam. My honest answer is that I don't think I'd have lasted more than 15 minutes into my first battle. Maybe I underestimate myself, but I just don't think I have the kind of guts it takes to succeed at a close, personal war. In my opinion, McCain was a hero after what he went through on the Forrestal. His performance while a POW was epic.

However, in his political life, he has been nothing but a self-promoting shill. We saw this most clearly in 2000, when the MSM fell in love with "The Maverick". To name just a few, he slimed his way out of lasting damage from his Keating-5 connections; he's furthered this with his McCain-Feingold abomination; and is now in the middle of doing the same thing by inserting Congress into major-league sports steroids abuse (which I commented on here).

Schieffer noted McCain's use of the Honor Code as a mechanism to cope with the brutality of the North Vietnamese POW camps, and then compares this Honor Code to what we're doing in Guantanamo. His last four paragraphs...

I thought about that as yet another tale of torture and abuse came out about the POW camp we are running at Guantanamo Bay.

Columnist Tom Friedman said the prison ought to be shut down because the stories about it are so inflaming the Arab world they're making the war on terrorism more dangerous for our American soldiers to fight.

But as I watched the McCain movie, I wondered if the greater danger is the impact Guantanamo is having on us. Do we want our children to believe this is how we are? Is this the code of honor we are passing on to the next generation?

As we reflect on the meaning of Memorial Day, let us remember first what it is that separates us from those who would take away our freedom -- what John McCain's dad taught his kid, what we should be teaching ours.

Well, to answer Schieffer, let me clue him in on a couple of things. These "torture and abuse" allegations we're hearing about are coming from the friggin' prisoners. These allegations have been investigated. What we hear described as "torture" is also often seen as nothing more than a fraternity prank here. The vilest "torture" alleged is that a woman interrogator has applied simulated menses on the Muslim prisoner and then kept him from cleaning himself. The "abuse" is said to have been mishandling of the Koran--apparantly a non-believer touched the holy Koran, or dropped it on the floor, or in some other way dis-respected their holy book. [I think even the MSM have dropped their claims that the Koran has been flushed down the toilet.] Let's not forget that these prisoners are the most violent and committed of the Islamofacists. They are strikingly intolerant of non-believers, to the point of believing that all non-believers need to be killed (Anyone else remember the Muslim Palestinians who took refuge from the Israelis in The Church of the Nativity? They desecrated venerated and historic Christian artifacts while there.).

And so Friedman thinks we ought to shut down Gitmo because the Arab Street is being inflamed. Should we shut down prisons because criminals don't like how they're treated inside? The simple fact is that we don't create our enemies...they create themselves. We are a uniquely generous and tolerant people. Shutting down Gitmo will not appease the Arab Street. They'll love (or at least tolerate) us when we win. Appeasement will do nothing.

Finally, Schieffer confuses the Code of Honor. We are not beheading or summarily executing prisoners. Sure, Gitmo isn't a kid's summer camp, but we are being quite generous in treating them as Prisoners of War at all (something they are not entitled to, IMO). Schieffer gazes at his navel and brings a moral equivalence to something that makes him uncomfortable (apparantly he's forgotten Daniel Pearl)--our treatment of Islamofacist prisoners. They're not Sunday School teachers--they're people who would do anything to bring down everything we hold dear. They're being treated appropriately. If we only gain a few nuggets of intelligence, or accomplish nothing more than to remove them from the battlefield, then what we're doing in Gitmo is the right thing.