As a child I used to love Andy Rooney's end bit of 60 minutes. I enjoyed the critical thought process he would apply to everyday things like soap. That being said, I never paid much attention to the man's political opinions until fairly recently.

     I completely disagreed with the points Mr. Rooney made in his article "Our Soldiers are Not Heroes" and had not found much else to agree with him on recently as he focused mainly on the War where his political views and mine differ wildly. This does not mean that he is a bad author or a bad person or even that he is unpatriotic. I think he beleives what he writes and he makes no effort to disguise that he is writing an op-ed column and not a hard news piece. Bravo for you Mr. Rooney.

     This rather lengthy intro brings me to his lastest article, "Our Darkest Days are Here". While the article (title included) may occasionally dip into a bit of poetically liscensed hyperbole I agree with it's salient points on the whole. If the four or five of you who regularly read this blog may recall I argued many of these same issues as a sort of response piece to an article of Brad's a while back. (You are coming late to this party Andy but strap on the pointy hat anyway)

     For those who dont have the time or inclination to read Mr. Rooney's article I will reproduce some bits I felt particularly interesting. Sort of an "anti-fisking" I suppose.

"The image of one bad young woman with a naked man on a leash did more to damage America's reputation than all the good things we've done over the years ever helped our reputation."

     While I dont think it washed everything away completely as Mr. Rooney does, I do think that this incident coupled with the subsequent attempts to rationlize it away did more damage in a short amount of time that almost any other *recent* single incident. The moral high ground is located on a balance beam and it is very hard to stay on it.

"Where were your officers? If someone told you to do it, tell us who told you. If your officers were told – we should know who told them."

     This is another issue that has gnawed at me since this whole scene came to light. Even if no orders were issued for this sort of thing, (which strains my credulity), officers whether commisioned or not are supposed to take responsibility for their soldier's actions. The sheer lack of supervision here *alone* should be a court martial offense for both the NCOs in direct supervision of these soldiers and for the prison's commanding officer at the very least. That the officer corps has closed ranks on this is nothing short of disgusting and corrupt.

     I won't bore you further but I did wan't to highlight the work of this left-leaning author in counterpoint to the normally right-wing content you hear me spew on a regular basis. 

Emperor Misha has a rather different take on this here. Read at your own risk.