SmithAntics

Reading letters to the editor in my paper this morning, and observing viewer emails to cable news programs, I was troubled (but, sadly, not surprised) to discover that a great many Americans lump ordinary Iraqis and the individuals who attacked the United States on 9-11 into a single terrorist enemy.

Call it the Inhofe Effect, a malady in which one lazily accepts a simplistic, racist, politically concocted mythology of the Arab as terrorist. Symptoms include expressions of ignorant animal outrage that “liberal pinheads” are “whining” about the “justified treatment” of Iraqis detained by the U.S. military, and that “the only language these fanatics understand is violence.”

Never mind that we are learning as many as 90 percent of the detainees were ordinary Iraqis rounded up in random sweeps and who have no connection to the insurgency or terrorist acts of any kind.

Never mind the distinction between genuine terrorism and armed resistance to an illegal occupation.

Never mind that it is never, under any circumstances, acceptable to sodomize a human being with a broom handle, or pile naked individuals into a pyramid and crush them and stomp on their fingers, or force men to simulate masturbation or anal sex, or rape a woman, or desecrate a corpse. Never.

Oh yes, and never mind that…

IRAQ DID NOT ATTACK US ON 9-11, YOU NAIVE FUCKING RUBES.

PULL YOUR HEAD OUT OF SEAN HANNITY’S ASS.

My god, has the human race evolved at all in the past thousand years? Are people just willfully ignorant? How can roughly half of the adult population of this country blindly accept BushCo's fraudulent "War on Terror." I'm serious here. Someone please answer this question.