Numerous rightie bloggers were pissed that anyone would say that the Danish editor might not have been very smart to publish the Mohammed cartoons. As I pointed
out a few days ago, National Review's own soulless automaton of an academic, Victor Davis Hanson, was appalled.
Like the appeasement of the 1930s, we are in the great age now of ethical retrenchment. So much has been lost even since 1960; then the very idea that a Dutch cartoonist whose work had offended radical Muslims would be in hiding for fear of his life would have been dismissed as fanciful.
Insidiously, the censorship only accelerates. It is dressed up in multicultural gobbledygook about hurtfulness and insensitivity, when the real issue is whether we in the West are going to be blown up or beheaded if we dare come out and support the right of an artist or newspaper to be occasionally crass.
Imagine my shock, of course, when I read V.D.H. defending the press, when he had
only recently complained that the press should keep its complaints to itself.
But, if Hanson and the bloggers who have discovered, finally, the value of a free press really believe what they wrote about the Danish cartoons then they have a chance to show it. The Pentagon wants journalists to quit showing stuff they don't like. Here's the Pentagon's viewpoint in an article published in the exact opposite of a free press, the American Forces Press Service.
Publicizing more images depicting alleged abuse of detainees at Iraqi's Abu Ghraib prison could bring harm to U.S. servicemembers, a senior Defense Department official said here today.
The release of more Abu Ghraib images "could only further inflame and possibly incite unnecessary violence in the world and would endanger our military men and women that are serving in places around the world," DoD spokesman Bryan Whitman told Pentagon reporters.
"The abuses at Abu Ghraib have been fully investigated," Whitman said. "As you know, it's been the policy of this department - it has been and continues to be - that all detainees in our custody will be treated humanely."
Have at 'em, wingnuts.
You first, Vic.
Cross-posted at Nitpicker.