I don’t want anyone to misunderstand the nature of this post. I have never paid much attention to Amnesty International, or Human Rights Watch. So I’d never even try to vouch for them. But this struck me as funny:

We also know that it is suicidally irresponsible for groups that depend on the moral force of their pronouncements to habitually say things they don’t actually mean. Rhetorical inflation is a dangerous indulgence…. — Kenneth Anderson, “An American Gulag?” (June 5, 2005) CBS News.

In spite of my reticence over appearing to support AI and HRW — which, I reiterate, I am not doing because I don’t have time to research their records — I am bemused over the apologists rushing to the front lines of America’s defense. Guantanamo is, in the minds of many, just fine. Abu Ghraib is a faint memory. Never as painful for us as it has been for the rest of the world, it grows less so in the American consciousness even as everyone else recognizes it is increasingly typical of what America stands for.

For our part, every new revelation of abuse is downplayed. The abuses are really not so bad; they were either accidents or aberrations.

The biggest irony of all, though, is that the quote above was made by a right-wing apologist.

And it wasn’t about right-wing apologists.