"The United States Military in World War II contained idiots, murderers, rapists, thieves, perverts, and sociopaths. This did not stop the other members of this force from becoming known as “The Greatest Generation.” And it should not have. Every society and organization should be known by the representative character of its rank and file, not by the character of its most remote moral outliers. But to those intent on defaming the U.S., its war effort, or the current administration, such a thought is non-sense.
Every soldier is a potential poster boy for Iraq or Guantanamo –all he has to do is something wrong. If a couple of ignorant perverts make prisoners perform homoerotic Twister for a souvenir photo, this is a direct and inevitable result of Donald Rumsfeld being Secretary of Defense. If one frustrated soldier –forced to deal daily with the most heinous religious fanatics imaginable-- gets mad and kicks a Koran, this is George W. Bush’s insensitive Gulag state at work.
The really fabulous thing about this form of dishonesty is that you never have to tell a lie (or make up memos), you simply have to report the small as though it were large and the rare as if it were common.
Once you’ve adopted this standard, you’re 100% guaranteed of the outcome: America --bad, bad, bad. The result, however, says less about America than it does about the people that set such impossible standards."
Mac Johnson
June 6, 2005
