Your Daily Moment Of Coprophilia

The mental giants at Powerline, Time magazine's blog of the year in 2004, are writing the pretty typical response out of the tribal regions of East Blogistan to the story about the Haditha massacre and its fallout.

Of course, everyone condemns the wanton killing of civilians, no matter the provocation, and if it turns out that that's what happened, the guilty will be severely punished. But this isn't enough for the Times, or for liberals generally. They are after bigger game, so they must pretend that the murdering of civilians is somehow condoned by the U.S. military and the Bush administration.

If that isn't clear enough for you, consider the words of the Oxycontin Whorehopper:

That’s what Haditha represents — and they are going about it gleefully. They are ecstatic about it… Folks, let me just put it in graphic terms. It is going to be a gang rape. There is going to be a gang rape by the Democratic Party, the American left and the Drive-By Media, to finally take us out in the war against Iraq.

But the curious thing to me in all this windy indignation from our pseudo-fascist cousins is the complete lack of attention they're paying to the "evolving" explanation for the incident as various bits of reality exposed the earlier official explanations as being at variance with the truth.

Let's leave aside, for the moment, the troubling questions about the conduct of the U.S. Marines in Haditha on the day those unarmed Iraqi civilians were murdered. Wingnuts argue that the civilians in question were all enemy combatants, and they deserved what they got. For evidence of this, they trot out a badly misinterpreted quote from the twelve-year-old girl who survived the massacre in an interview provided to ABC News. She said one thing, and the wingnuts heard the exact opposite. The girl said she heard a flash-bang set off by the marines as part of the home invasion operation. The wingnuts think she said she knew about the roadside IED before it went off and covered her ears, revealing that she and all the other residents of the house were in on the bombing. How they get there is a complete mystery.

But okay— so the wingnuts have gotten suckered into yet another lie about the Iraq war. Big surprise, right? So here's what has me scratching my head: why don't they want to talk about the changing official story about what happened?

First, the story was that the civilians were all killed by the IED. That story collapsed when the Hammurabi Human Rights Group gave over video captures of the aftermath showing the bodies, not out on the road, but in the house— and riddled with bullets and not shrapnel. So, the official story changed. The civilians all died in the crossfire between U.S. armed forces and insurgents. Unfortunately, that story collapsed when the forensic evidence came in showing that the only shells expended that day came from weapons carried by the marines. Finally, the official story has converged on something resembling an honest explanation, i.e. we're not sure what happened, but there's an ongoing criminal investigation.

A criminal investigation that has been ongoing for about seven months now.

Wingnuts are in a lather, crying "what's the rush?" Apparently, in East Blogistan, it makes more sense to hold U.S. troops in the brig for seven months without charging them in a crime, than it does to put them on trial.

But the curiousity remains for me: why don't they want to talk about the changing story? If they really believe a) the line about how the civlians were all enemy combatants who knew about the IED before it went off, and b) all that Shelby Steele crapology about how the U.S. is losing the War In Iraq by not fighting with sufficient ruthlessness, then you'd think they'd be annoyed about the lying.

Why didn't the U.S. Marines just tell the truth from the beginning? "We got hit with a roadside bomb. It killed one of our guys. So, we went to the nearest house, and we toadcranked everybody in it. Unarmed men, women, and even children— everybody. That'll teach those fucking hodgies some goddamn respect, we figured. It's the only way to get through to them, you know. They don't understand anything but violence. They all had it coming."

Apparently, though— the lying about the story is not really a problem in their minds. I'd be entirely unsurprised to hear some wingnut explain to me that, of course, the original story was a dirty horrible lie. If the U.S. Marines had told the truth, why— there would have been a criminal investigation, and a media outrage, and all those things that have since happened now that the truth has come out. God damn those evil liberal media for exposing the truth!

That's the part that kills me.

It's not enough that the U.S. Marines should be murdering unarmed Iraqi civilians in cold blood. It's apparently unpatriotic and damned near treasonable to admit it. The wingnuts are in a very seriously twisted wonderland here. They want their troops to be ruthless violent killers of women and children, but they also need the troops to lie to them about it.

I do not understand this. It makes no sense.