Words fail us...

…just like our government.

If I was in the mood for poetical allusions, I’d say that the bigger blogs were too stunned for words and that that’s why they have yet to report on this (Blogger being down for the third day in a row isn’t helping, either).

But I’m not in the mood for poetry, nor making funny because this definitely is not funny. I’m accustomed to thinking that snark and a shitty attitude will always save the day and can overcome any adversity. But this isn’t a damned bit funny.

And it comes at a really shitty time, the same day that Rumsfeld had his Three Mile Island, Jack Lemmon China Syndrome meltdown at his press conference and just twelve days before the mid-term elections. And just 48 hours after Dick Cheney openly snarled that, yes, waterboarding did happen and that it’s good for you, good for me, good for America. After all, it’s all double-legal, now, right?

But is the rape of children?

The pictures will finally be out. They’re coming out and if this doesn’t get us the majority in both chambers of Congress plus the keys to Washington, DC and for Bill Clinton to get exclusive, North American rights to fuck the Bush twins in the Lincoln bedroom, nothing will.

And we have to look at them. We must look at them just as surely as we must look at that hideous accident on the freeway, the one that you know no one could’ve survived and that state troopers, with monstrous irony, make you agonizingly crawl past. We have to look because, in a way, it’s our duty. It’s our grim duty as Americans to know what is being done with our tax dollars, in our once-good name. It’s our duty to swallow the red pill and not the blue one.

Federal judge Alvin K. Hellerstein, three days ago, ordered the release of the photographs proving that rape, including the rape of children, was happening on our watch at the now-infamous Abu Ghraib prison.

Only a handful of the pictures will be released out of the thousands turned over to the authorities (the ones on Weazl's site, it turns out, were first posted back in 2004. But they at least serve to prepare you for what is to come) and this is out of the same batch that started the torture scandal. So the next time you say grace at the dinner table, include a thanks to Specialist Joseph Darby, the guy who basically fucked up the rest of his life for doing the right thing and being the whistleblower that is created in times such as this.

What I’d like to know is, why did it take us this long to find this out and why hasn’t anyone else in the blogosphere reported on it, yet? Why is Curt Weldon and even the rapidly cooling Mark Foley scandal still bigger than this? Torturing adults is bad enough but you’d think that the rape of children would be the makings for an even bigger scandal. I don’t know, I guess it’s where you’re raised.

I would think, though, that this isn’t the kind of story, in both size and significance, that wouldn’t ordinarily fall through the cracks. After all, the White House thought enough about these photos and videos to use every slimy legal maneuver they could think of to keep these pictures under wraps until at least the mid term elections.

Well, darn it, the Republicans were just twelve days from losing their majority in Congress with at least a shred of dignity, wherever they could’ve found it. But this… Well, dignity’s a wistful memory at this point.

These photographs, to our fine party of personal responsibility, this family values administration, were really nothing more than a political liability, an embarrassment to be kept under brown paper like those incriminating girlie mags that Dad used to stuff in his closet but not well enough from Junior.

An embarrassment and a political liability and nothing more.

The rapes may or may not have happened with George W. Bush’s knowledge but the existence of these photos and news of the rape and torture of kids who’d be in middle school were they fortunate enough to live here, was well within his store of knowledge. And he willingly suppressed these pictures. With the aid of his Vice President and Secretary of Defense.

And in the year or so that they’ve been vainly trying to sit on top of this heaving mass of screaming inhumanity at least until November 8th, from George Bush to Joe Lieberman, they’ve been standing up on their hind legs like the weasels that they are and kept telling us how fantastic things are going there, that we’re making a real difference, they were making friends with the Iraqis like five year-olds the first day of kindergarten, that the liberation is at hand, comrades…

…all the while knowing what happened on their watch under the seemingly passive eye of Americans who were allowed to take photographs of this most obscene of obscenities.

Nothing to see here, my fellow Americans. No bad news to report. You wouldn’t want to be unpatriotic now, would you? Now, by the attrition invested in me by the United States of America and God Almighty, I now pronounce us Democracy and Democracy. You may now kiss the bride before you fuck her up the ass.

Because the dissemination of these images would hinder our valiant and noble war on terror, now wouldn’t it? And it would make Gen. Abizaid’s job that much harder, now wouldn’t it? In fact, let’s revisit the good general’s words on the subject: “"When we continue to pick at the wound and show the pictures over and over again it just creates the image--a false image--like this is the sort of stuff that is happening anew, and it's not.”

In other words, let’s just move on past this old unpleasantness and pretend that it never happened on George Bush’s and his watch.

Now, to a mind polished as round and smooth as a PBA bowling ball by relentless spin and oleaginous assurances, this would sound reasonable. After all, a study conducted soon after 9/11 proved that the networks' incessant replaying of the planes flying into the WTC traumatized children because they thought they were seeing America attacked over and over again.

But we're not children, General. You're thinking of the people that were being raped.

The only possible upside would be in finding out that no Americans were involved in the actual rapes. But we likely took the pictures, since one of our own had access to thousands of them, which makes us no better than accomplices.

But after Graner, England and company, anything’s possible.

Trouble is, if we were actually winning the fucking war on terror, the administration would have one sinew of credibility and justification for suppressing these photos. But we’re not. All 16 of our intelligence agencies all but came out in force and said so. Iraq is dissolving into a soup of blood, Willie Pete and soft, soft money doled out on demand to the Parsons Group, Halliburton and KBR, literally, by the palette.

The raping of these children and adults by savages who are, in that respect, more despicable than the terrorists whom we’ve sworn to kill and otherwise indistinguishable, these savages that we call Ally, this most abominable breaking of the most basic trust, the trust between child and adult, is what our fine souls in the administration would call “collateral damage.”

And who gives a shit if they’re Iraqis? It’s not as if they’re your children, right? It’s not as if they’re American or white or pretty like Natalee Holloway. Maybe that’s why it took us three days to report on this, why it was up to my friend Weazl and his little-read blog.

I was about to write an open letter to Ned Lamont on his failing campaign and I’ll get around to it in time but when I first got the request from Weazl to help him get the word out, how could I say no? How could a snarky letter to Ned Lamont take priority? It can’t.

Because this just has to twist like a dull, rusty knife in the gut of anyone who has children or even just anyone who cares one iota about children, anybody’s children. This is the price of reckless, cock-wanding regime change and damn the collateral damage. Dear Leader had to get his war on but was too cowardly to face the political and moral consequences of publicly owning up to these rapes and beatings and tortures, these basest of degradations that one human can inflict on another.

Because, if the other sex scandal, the Mark Foley brouhaha, proved one thing, it's that party loyalty trumps anything, including the trust between adult and child and manfully taking accountability.

--- Jurassicpork.