Thursday, June 03, 2004

Why does this man still have a job
Trent Lott continues to be an embarrassment to the people of Mississippi, but I doubt as if the will do anything about it.
Sen. Trent Lott (R-Miss.) proved he has not lost his knack for inflammatory rhetoric when he defended "really rough" treatment of Iraqi prisoners by U.S. soldiers, including the use of dogs against a prisoner "unless the dog ate him."

[…]

"Hey, nothing wrong with holding a dog up there, unless the dog ate him, scared him with a dog," Lott said. When WAPT news anchorman Brad McMullan noted that a prisoner died at Abu Ghraib, apparently after a beating, Lott responded, "This is not Sunday school; this is interrogation; this is rough stuff."

Some of the prisoners "should not have been prisoners in the first place, probably should have been killed," he added.

Where do you even begin with something like this? Beating a prisoner to death is not Sunday school; it’s murder. In the last sentence he seems to be advocating summary executions. Through it all is the good old boy attitude toward lawlessness in the name of law enforcement: if someone is arrested they probably did something to deserve it, so it doesn’t matter if you beat them, frame them, or kill them. They probably had it coming. The whole thing also stinks of chickenhawk, posturing macho. Lott, we will recall, spent his able-bodied youth as a cheer-leader at Ol’ Miss.

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