Git(mo) ‘R' Done!

A pack of AWFL lies

by Thomas Lindaman
06/16/05

Whether it’s Amnesty International comparing the conditions a the prisoner of war camp to a gulag or Newsweek claiming that American soldiers urinated on a prisoner’s Quran, we’ve heard a lot about Guantanamo Bay lately. Even Senator Joe “Source Citations Are For Pansies” Biden has come out and said we should shut down Gitmo personally in light of the allegations against us. If I didn’t know better, I’d think that somewhere George Soros is trying to drive down property values there so that he can buy up a bunch of property and start a tropical resort.

But in every story lately, as with most of the stories coming out about the War on Terror, the war in Iraq, about George W. Bush wearing a red tie with a blue suit, there’s a consistent tone: America bad, prisoners good. This is consistent with the modern liberal viewpoint that no matter what America does, it’s going to screw up worse than Paris Hilton running Chernobyl. But I still have to wonder why there’s so much of this anti-American sentiment out there at this point in time. Have we really become an evil twin of the real America, complete with Van Dyke from the “Mirror, Mirror” episode of “Star Trek”? (Okay, so I’m a sci fi geek. Sue me.)

At the risk of sounding like a Bush apologist, I don’t think so. We knew Saddam Hussein was a bad, bad man, but it wasn’t until Dubya got into office that we decided to do something about him. And after three weeks of combating the Iraqi Army, we had Saddam scurrying for the closest spider hole with basic cable. This was something Bill Clinton said he wanted to do when he was President, but couldn’t do for one reason or another. (Ironic for a President not known for performance anxiety when it comes to the ladies to need the military equivalent of Viagra to get something done in Iraq.)

Ahhhh…I think we’re onto something here. The anti-American sentiment from the faux left can be boiled down to politics. The anti-war faux left (or AWFL as I call them) was convinced that we just needed to give the UN sanctions and weapons inspections more time to work before we went in with guns a-blazin’. And if we gave them, oh, twenty or thirty more years, we would have had Saddam ready to work with us. Of course, he’d probably be dead, but still…

What George W. Bush did in Iraq is the great unpardonable sin to the AWFL: he proved them wrong. After a decade of Saddam thumbing his noses at the United Nations, Bush decided enough was enough and went to war. And we accomplished more in three weeks than the sanctions and the weapons inspectors ever did. This fact drives the AWFL positively nuts!

And this sudden loss of cabin pressure in the AWFL’s sanity airplane has led to media folks and politicians looking for anything to detract from the good we’re doing in the War on Terror. They’ve focused their efforts on conditions in Guantanamo Bay, apparently, given the amount of coverage we’ve seen in recent weeks. But it’s not as big of a weak link as they believe. After the Newsweek story broke, the military conducted its own investigation and found out that those mean, evil, nasty American soldiers…were treating Muslims with the utmost respect. Oh, horrors! Someone get the UN on the horn! We have to stop them before the American soldiers start letting the Muslims pray at their designated times without interruption!

Of course there are some exceptions, but when you consider that the bulk of the negative stories coming out of Gitmo are as factual as a Kitty Kelly book, you get a vastly different picture of what the AWFL is presenting as the truth. Of course, it doesn’t help your credibility any when your biggest PR weapon is a report by an organization who had to admit they wrote the report without ever having visited the prisoner of war camp.

But facts aren’t what drive the AWFL’s arguments. It’s white hot hatred of anything America does. When you look at the Gitmo situation objectively and with a healthy helping of factual information, you find we’re not doing things perfectly there, but we aren’t making the Marquis de Sade look like the Dalai Lama, either. (Besides, I think the Dalai Lama would look terrible in black latex, but I digress.) But we can’t overlook the fact that the ones who are supposed to be the hatemongers are the ones showing the most amount of respect to the prisoners, while the ones who are supposed to be the open-minded and tolerant ones are resorting to hatred and lies about those they hate.

Is it just me, or does anyone else expect Rod Serling to pop out sometime and welcome us to the Twilight Zone?

And that’s the Bottom Line.

For permission to reprint this article, please contact us at editor@commonconservative.com