This is Rich

Frank Rich on May 30 wrote:

This joyous memory came rushing back after the grim revelation of yet another kink in the torture regime at Abu Ghraib. As if sexual humiliation and violent abuse weren't punishment enough, the guards also made prisoners violate Islamic practice by force-feeding them booze.

How do we square the tales of American cruelty with the promise of democracy we thought we were bringing to Iraq? One obvious way might be to acknowledge with some humility that our often proud history has always had a fault line, running from slavery to Wounded Knee to My Lai. (Read accounts of Andersonville, the Confederate-run Civil War prison at which some 13,000 died, for literal echoes of some of Abu Ghraib's inhumanity.) But there's an easier way out in 2004: blame Janet Jackson for what's gone wrong in Iraq, or if not her, then Jenna Jameson.

Andersonville was a concentration camp comparable to Hitler's. I don't know if it was intended to murder POWs or not, but to claim that it literally echoed the Abu Ghraib abuses (which, by the way, is reversed in time), is about as stupid and offensive a claim as I've seen since 9/11.