Want a sense of just how weird the mentality of some people can be? Here's what Delaware's Senator Joe Biden said today, regarding the reaction of the Arab world to the prisoner abuse scandal:
"We probably would have done less damage to our image and our legitimacy and our motive had Iraqi prisoners been shot."
And you know what? That's probably true. There would probably be less fall-out had our guards actually murdered those men instead of sexually humiliating them.
Now, I'm a big believer in human dignity and I know I wouldn't want to be treated as those prisoners were. But I also believe that life is worth living and that you can overcome shame. Human beings are resilient. We all go through hell on Earth many times in our lives and, if we are mentally and emotionally strong enough, we can survive a lot of things we may think before we never could.
But murdering a defenseless man is less of a crime than stripping him of his clothes and sexually degrading him before strangers? I think that's weird. Of course, it's no weirder than this whole scandal, whereby a system of incredibly violent and widespread torture and murder practiced for decades by the former government is mitigated by an outburst of stupidity and criminality from a handful of prison guards. Go figure.