My Aisling

Gear Shift

Mark Steyn in the Washington Times does such a fine job of nailing Kerry's rhetorical nuances that it is clear he can never be elected on his own - just like he wasn't nominated on his own. That took Dean's Independence-Day-in-January celebration to occur.

So now the gears shift from watching Kerry bumble his way through the national spotlight to watching W handle a hot potato in the prisoner abuse situation.

First, it's a shame that it occurred. But I write that lightly. They are not civilians that happened to walk past the prison. They are enemy combatants that were captured rather than killed. Their focus in life before incarceration was to kill us. We need to interrogate these rogues. Pride is a big issue in Middle Eastern men - so take away their pride. I have no problem with that. None whatsoever.

Would you rather a good ole-fashioned beating? Or perhaps just a kind smile and a politely posed question?

W is taking a beating, speaking of those, in the press because the liberals love to express indignation. They love to seize upon an issue. Their problem is they did the same thing with out-sourcing of jobs, until they learned that out-sourcing actually had a net increase of jobs to the US because of higher profits and resulting higher investments in research and development - the type of jobs we do not out-source.

They did the same thing with overall job loss - then 300,000 new jobs a month became reality and they moved on.

Anyone hear of Kerry's Misery Index since its launch? Rather like a Soviet rocket. Lots of fanfare leading up to launch day, everyone gathers with great expectation. The countdown. Ignition. Liftoff. Such spectacle. Truly the Soviet system is great. Wow. Watch it go!! Ut-oh. It seems to be listing to the right. Look out!! Incoming!!!

Now the prisoner abuse. New photos to come. First - who is the clown who decided to memorialize this as a Kodak moment? That person should be shot at the break of daylight.

I saw a cartoon today that summarized it all nicely. A guy was in his high rise office watching a report on TV about the situation. Says something like, "Oh my, stacking naked men. What could be worse?!?" In the next panel, as he continues to watch TV, in the window behind him is a commercial airliner headed straight for his window.

This is war. W did not ask for it. But when September 11 happened, we gave him no choice. We wanted him to go to war. So he did. We made him a war-time president. So we need to take all the ride with him. Not just the happy times. Are we going to do bad things? Of course. Have we done bad things in every war? Of course we have. Do we torture people to obtain information? I sure hope so - and I trust the information we get has more than once saved the life of an innocent at the expense of pain to a enemy combatant.

Is hurting someone's pride torture? Maybe, if your mirror is a bit concave here, a bit convex there ... if you consider the alternative is cable TV and three meals a day, a Koran and a prayer blanket ... and ignore that the real alternative is Saddam's way - amputation, kill your children as you watch, rape your wife and daughters as you watch, shred your father in a plastic shredding machine. You want a more civilized version of torture? Go to the 1970s and 1980s and read about England's treatment of the IRA prisoners. That was torture. Water hoses, sleep deprivation, beatings.

Maybe under some dementia-laden minds, incapable anymore of assessing current actions in the long view of history, these prison actions are torture maybe. But perhaps that is why Sen. Robert KKK Byrd is a leading spokesman. Just curious - just what did the KKK do to black Americans? Did they humiliate them like this? Or just frighten them with burning crosses and then hang the men? Gee, such a long time ago ...

The liberals had better remember Shakespeare - "The lady doth protest too much, methinks." Hamlet (III, ii, 239).