VDH Watch 10: Vic vs. Jimmy

Our man Vic's columns are such a rich source of hackery that you can even return to one of them over and over without the fountain running dry.

For instance, take the column we examined in VDH Watch 7: The Biteback Effect: Do we even have a word to describe the new criticism? by Victor Davis Hanson National Review Online and http://www.victorhanson.com/ 08/19/05.

One of Vic's specialties is defending the use of criminal, sadistic torture in the Bush Gulag. So in that one, he was harshing on Jimmy Carter for criticizing same. Here's Vic's hack version of things:

On the basis of an FBI agent's e-mail alleging loud rap music, cold room temperatures, and the rough handling of a Koran, former president Jimmy Carter and Illinois Democratic Senator Dick Durbin advanced Guantanamo as a national scandal and proof of our amorality in this war.

"I think what's going on in Guantanamo Bay and other places is a disgrace to the USA," Pius Maximus Carter pontificated, adding that the detention center had "given impetus and excuses to potential terrorists." ...

Jimmy Carter thinks that something we do in Guantanamo galvanizes terrorists ...

When Jimmy Carter talks of morality, I brace for even more amorality ...

Here's a different take on Carter's comments on Gitmo: Is Guantanamo Bay Undermining the Global War on Terror? by Gerard Fogarty Parameters (US Army War College) Autumn 2005.

The Military Commissions empowered under President Bush's military order are the exact types of trials that the United States openly condemns in the international community. In today's media environment, inconsistencies such as this are highlighted, evaluated, and then broadcast repeatedly to every corner of the globe. The effect of this apparent double standard is to deny the United States the moral high ground it needs to censure other nations in the future for human rights abuses. Such double standards potentially place the Administration at odds with the values of the American people, thereby creating a fault line that if pressured in the future may degrade the domestic support base for what is going to be a generation-long Global War on Terrorism. General John Gordon, a retired Air Force general and former CIA director who served as both the senior counterterrorism official and homeland security adviser on President Bush's National Security Council, best described this dilemma with the comment, "There was great concern that we were setting up a process that was contrary to our own ideals."

The worldwide promotion of human rights is clearly in keeping with America's most deeply held values. Colin Powell has said that "respect for human rights is essential to lasting peace and sustained economic growth, goals which Americans share with people all over the world." At the Human Rights Defenders of the Frontlines of Freedom Conference at the Carter Center in November 2003, former President Jimmy Carter was disturbed to find that many participants believed the United States is contributing directly to an erosion of human rights by its current policies with respect to the Guantanamo detainees. Moreover, President Carter deplored the indefinite detention of the suspects at Guantanamo and added, "I say this because this is a violation of the basic character of my country and it's very disturbing to me." The attacks against the United States on 9/11 were horrific, and it is in the interest of all civilized nations that the perpetrators be tried and punished, but long-held US values on human rights must outweigh the nation's desire for retribution. As General John Shalikashvili, a former Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, has so accurately stated, "The US has repeatedly faced foes in its past that, at the time they emerged, posed threats of a nature unlike any that it had previously faced, but the US has been far more steadfast in the past in keeping faith with its national commitment to the rule of law." To do otherwise only adds to the growing worldwide anti-Americanism that undermines US credibility and, therefore, US influence and effectiveness. (my emphasis)

Gee, from this it sounds like Carter, Gordon and Shalikashvili all think that something more consequential than an occasional excess of volume on the rap music may be happening in the Bush Gulag.

VDH hackery: the gift that just keeps on giving.

[For other installments, see Index to the VDH Watch.]