Put A Scarf On Your Empty Soul
by digby
You've probably heard about the moronic rightwing tizzy of the day criticizing Nancy Pelosi for wearing a scarf on her head in a mosque, when the internet is filled with pictures of Laura Bush and Condi Rice doing the same thing. You'd think they would have thought of this, but then hypocrisy or just plain idiocy isn't really a concern for them. Another day another rightwing fool...
But it made me recall some of their truly stomach churning commentary about reporter Jill Carroll when she was held hostage. You'll remember this, I'm sure:
MCGUIRK: She strikes me as the kind of woman who would wear one of those suicide vests. You know, walk into the — try and sneak into the Green Zone.
IMUS: Oh, no. No, no, no, no.
MCCORD: Just because she always appears in traditional Arab garb and wearing a burka.
MCGUIRK: Yeah, what’s with the head gear? Take it off. Let’s see.
MCCORD: Exactly. She cooked with them, lived with them.
IMUS: This is not helping.
MCGUIRK: She may be carrying Habib’s baby at this point.
IMUS: She could. It’s not like she was representing the insurgents or the terrorists or those people.
MCCORD: Well, there’s no evidence directly of that –
IMUS: Oh, gosh, you better shut up!
MCGUIRK: She’s like the Taliban Johnny or something.
And that was just the tip of the iceberg. Here's that horrible cretin Deb Schlussel with one of the most insane rants I've ever read, (not that it disqualified her from appearing on television chatting amiably with Jill Carroll's journalistic colleagues.)And there was much more. All of these disgusting piles of rancid rightwing swill made the reflexive assumption that because she was a reporter, (and a woman) Carroll was sympathetic with terrorists and they wished on her the most horrible of fates.
When Carroll was finally released she explained that she had been forced to do everything she had done and that she was in no way sympathetic to her captors. She was scared to death and tried to do what she could to survive long enough to get out of there. It was a story of amazing bravery and integrity.
It was also a low point among low points for the damaged lizard brains of the right and if they are actually religous (which I seriously doubt) they will burn in hell for what they said about her.
Which leads us to today and round 322 of hollow, inhumane wingnut idiocy:
On April 4, Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad announced at a 7:30 a.m. ET news conference in Tehran that the 15 British sailors and marines would be released. While Ahmadinejad maintained that all of the captives had admitted to trespassing in Iranian waters and that Iran had "every right" to put them on trial, he said that it was "a unilateral decision" to release the captives. He added that the decision was, in part, a "gift" to honor both the upcoming Easter holiday and the Muslim commemoration of the Prophet Muhammad's birth. He said the captives would be taken to the Tehran airport immediately following his remarks.
In his April 3 Post column -- headlined "Where's Winston?" -- Peters called the captives "wankers" and asserted that they "wimped out in a matter of days and acquiesced in propaganda broadcasts for their captors," a reference to videos aired on Iranian television in which several of the captives said that they had entered Iranian territory. Peters continued: "Jingoism aside, I can't imagine any squad of U.S. Marines behaving in such a shabby, cowardly fashion. Our Marines would have fought to begin with. Taken captive by force, they would've resisted collaboration. To the last man and woman." He went on to write that the "once-proud" British military has "collapsed to a sorry state."
In an April 3 post on National Review Online's weblog The Corner titled "Brit Wimps," Derbyshire linked to Peters' column and stated, "Once again, it's me and Ralph Peters on the same wavelength, deploring the cowardice of the British sailors and marines kidnapped by Iran." Derbyshire further wrote: "When it happened, I said I hoped the ones who'd shamed their country would be court-martialed on return to Blighty, and given dishonorable discharges after a couple years breaking rocks in the Outer Hebrides." Derbyshire added: "And in any case, there was no evidence of torture or mistreatment in any of the filmed cases I have seen. They look just fine. You can't fake that. The girl sailor had that headscarf on within hours. From what I've heard of torture, even weaker cases can hold out for a few days."
Don't you just love these meatheads having the gall to criticize the behavior of the military in circumstances that would make them foul their trousers in the first five seconds? I had expected the criticism's of Blair,and wrote about it earlier, but he's a politician and that's part of the game. To actually blame the sailors for surviving is unbelievable to me.
The rightwing is filled with these flatulent armchair warriors, ready to condemn everyone from intrepid reporters to the professional military for cowardice when they are captured by the enemy and fail to behave in what they consider a properly Rambo-esque manner. They seem to think these people should die rather than be taken alive or some other such puerile nonsense. (I guess it explains their hostility to John McCain --- better to be a rich, coke sniffing draft dodger than survive five years in a POW camp.)
These are empty, cruel little boys and girls with serious deficiencies in their characters. They are lost souls, walking this earth without ever learning the meaning of decency, empathy or morality. I suppose this is understandable on some level. The only "lives" they truly value exist only in a womb or a petrie dish. And apparently that's because these wingnuts relate to them --- they are just about as fully human as frozen blastocysts themselves.
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