What's getting to me about the Foley thing

[nancylebov]

As bad things go, what Foley did was only fair-to-middling bad. As a result of it, political careers will be ended and elections will probably be affected. There might be criminal charges.

At the same time, the US government has been torturing people, sometimes to death. It's quite plausible that this is still going on, what with all those prisoners being held in secret. A law has been passed making it legal to hold prisoners indefinitely in secret. This has not had nearly as much political effect as the Foley scandal, and the legitimizing of torture doesn't seem to be a big issue in the upcoming election.

I begin to suspect that I am surrounded by crazy people.

Comments

[fidelioscabinet.livejournal.com]

Substitute "l" for the "cr" in crazy and that accounts for some of it. Someone I work with said he didn't have the background to understand in any detail what had gone wrong with Iraq, the legal issues in the torture bill, the deficit issues, and so on. But it was easy to see that letting one of your Congressmen mess around with kids was just plain wrong.
Now, I think if he gave it any thought he could figure out most of the things he claims he can't understand, but he's right that "Letting one of your Congressmen mess around with kids" takes no effort to sort out. The light bulb goes on at once with that one.
I think another angle on the torture thing is that we've taken "Because we don't do these things, we are the Good Guys", and turned it around to "Because we are the Good Guys, we can't really be doing these things."