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May 24, 2009
Planet Obama: Where Hitler spoke Austrian and Churchill didn't torture
Obama's knowledge of World War II is laughably simplistic - and I admit to laughing my head off when I heard his comment about Austrian as a language. Europe blushed.
"Austrian? There's no such tongue. No they speak German," I howled. "Hitler spoke German too!"
Question: Does Obama, holder of diplomas from Harvard and Columbia, think Hitler spoke Austrian too, or does he think Hitler was born in Germany? Think about it liberal Democrats.
It gets worse. In more recent times, it appears that Obama is using a radical gay activist's blog to make history talking points too. Or at least he repeats blogger Andrew Sullivan's precious view that the conservative Winston Churchill won World War II without using torture!
Granted, Sullivan likes his torture stories a little too much. Here's Heather MacDonald in 2005:
Sullivan throws around the terms "torture" and "abuse" so often and indiscriminately that it is impossible to know whether he is referring to authorized interrogations or to illegal behaviour. He writes, for example, that "at Guantánamo, newly released documents show that some of the torturers felt that they were acting on the basis of memos sent from Washington." Which "torturers" is he referring to? If he means interrogators conducting routine interrogations, of course they felt that were acting on the basis of Washington guidance. They were! That guidance allowed interrogators to question a detainee past his bedtime, put him on cold Army rations, moderately adjust his environment, or isolate him.It would appear that Sullivan regards such methods as "torture." It is hard to say, however, since he never addresses the actual interrogation approaches authorized for Guantánamo. Those approaches were moderate, lawful, and closely hemmed in with oversight to ensure humane treatment, as the Schlesinger report found.
Sullivan redefines the "t" word in order to please professional male parakeets from the so-called "human rights" industry and bitter feminists bent on hunting down moral equivalency stories.
But there's another major problem: Conservative role model -- my hero -- Churchill was for physically intimidating fascists. Here's Nigel Jones, for example, in Mosley (p.138):
Over time, the internment of Britain's fascists became a legal nightmare for the government. Evidence of treasonable activities or opinions against all but a minority of BU members -- Mosley estimated them as 5 percent of the movement --- was negligible, and often acquired by dubious means. At one point, Alexander Raven Thomson and other detained BU members were taken to Ham Common, a secret M15 interrogation centre where psychological and occasionally physical torture was used on captured German spies. The British fascists were starved and threatened with immediate execution if they would not co-operate with the authorities.
So a bit of torture does work!
Churchill was a redhead for heaven's sake. Of course, he was for torturing fascists to save towns, cities, nations, and continents. Henry VIII. Prince Harry. Don't all redheads mean business?
And another cheeky question: Do you Americans speak American?