Hate speech alive and well on the pages of the NYT

There’s been a lot of talk lately, mainly amongst left wing hypocrites and Beltway conservative uptight types about how the right has supposedly engaged in “rampant, uncontrolled hate speech” since Barack Obama has been elected. Will they start examining their own backyard now that one of their most prominent spokespeople, Frank Rich, has taken the ‘torture’ memos and used them as a springboard to compare Bush/Cheney to … Columbine killers Dylan Klebold and Eric Harris?

WE don’t like our evil to be banal. Ten years after Columbine, it only now may be sinking in that the psychopathic killers were not jock-hating dorks from a β€œTrench Coat Mafia,” or, as ABC News maintained at the time, β€œpart of a dark, underground national phenomenon known as the Gothic movement.” In the new best seller β€œColumbine,” the journalist Dave Cullen reaffirms that Dylan Klebold and Eric Harris were instead ordinary American teenagers who worked at the local pizza joint, loved their parents and were popular among their classmates.

On Tuesday, it will be five years since Americans first confronted the photographs from Abu Ghraib on β€œ60 Minutes II.” Here, too, we want to cling to myths that quarantine the evil. If our country committed torture, surely it did so to prevent Armageddon, in a patriotic ticking-time-bomb scenario out of β€œ24.” If anyone deserves blame, it was only those identified by President Bush as β€œa few American troops who dishonored our country and disregarded our values”: promiscuous, sinister-looking lowlifes like Lynddie England, Charles Graner and the other grunts who were held accountable while the top command got a pass.

This is the second left wing knucklehead I’ve seen in the last two weeks refer to the “evil” allegedly engaged in by the US as “banal” (Andrew Sullivan was the first – are we detecting a talking points pattern, here?). Regardless of the facts – like the fact that the Obama administration deliberately redacted out of the release of the memos the notes about the results from the EITs (enhanced interrogation techniques), the fact that other former adminstration officials, like Clinton-era appointee George Tenet, has said that the use of EITs helped us more in our battle against AQ than any other interrogation technique – something echoed in a recent WSJ piece by Mukasey and Hayden, the fact that in his piece, Rich ignored that info and only quoted Bush’s FBI director Robert Mueller as saying the EITs haven’t helped in order to imply that most in the Bush admin agreed with him, and completely ignored his own paper’s reporting of how Obama’s own DNI said that they did aid in the fight against AQ, the fact that the record clearly states that the use of EITs against KSM stopped the second plot on the LA Library tower – these clueless idiots persist in the myth that not only did the administration authorize “torture” but that furthermore the enhanced interrogation techniques they did use did not produce any results whatsoever, when the evidence indicates otherwise.

Sullivan, Rich, nor other left wing blowhards are able to get beyond their ridiculous, still-burning hatred for President Bush and it’s obviously impacted their judgment here. Not that they had much good judgment begin with.

Write the NYT and let them know what you think of Rich comparing Bush and Cheney to thug killers like Klebold and Harris. Whatever people think of Bush and Cheney, to view them as deliberate and calculating murderers on the same level as Klebold and Harris is both despicable and contemptible, and shows a complete lack of common sense, perspective, and decency. Not only that, but the omission of several key facts counter to his “argument” suggests Rich deliberately lied to advance an agenda.

Gosh. This happened on the pages of the NYT? Imagine that.

Cross-posted to Right Wing News, where I am helping guestblog for John Hawkins on Sundays.

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