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The Monkey Goes Where the
Wind Blows
HUMOR COLUMN by Dave Tomar
This week, the Bush administration continued its efforts to quell the flames
of controversy over alleged abuse of Iraqi detainees in the Abu Ghraib prison,
taking an official stance of idle regret. As anger continues to fester amongst
the public and Congressional lawmakers alike, the president offered a rare
apology to the Iraqi and American people during a Tuesday press conference. He
explained that “those photographs were a disgrace and a stain on the American
military which has performed so honorably in its annihilation and detention of
Iraqis to this point. The White House condemns those photographs. For one
thing, the lighting was all wrong. When I look at a freshly beaten, stripped
naked Iraqi, I want to be able to see his butthole puckered with fear. These
pictures are too blurry. For that, I am sorry.”
He conceded that “the American public has come to expect a certain degree of
humanity, decency and restraint from this administration. These photographs
fall pretty much into line with the degree of which I speak. But we never
intended to get caught treating people this way. Normally, we would treat
people like this behind closed doors and we’d give it a name like Operation
Caress Iraqis Gently With Loving Kindness or Operation Don’t Molest Iraqi War
Prisoners. Of course, the pictures make that pretty difficult. So instead, I
can only say how deeply troubling I find it, and how truly sorry I am, that
most of the Iraqi prisoners depicted in those horrific photographs still had
all of their limbs intact and weren’t burnt beyond human recognition. This is
not how we do things in Iraq.”
He went further to address the possibility that this crisis may have damaged
the credibility of U.S. intentions in Iraq, explaining that “credibility was
never an issue. If we were worried about credibility in the first place, I’d
be a shoeshine boy in a Crawford, Texas subway station instead of the
president of the United States. Ok. I admit that it looks pretty bad. All the
torturing and humiliation makes us look exactly like the evil Saddam Hussein.
But that’s just not true. We’re nothing like him. When Hussein was in charge,
they had stuff like electricity and sewage disposal. But seriously, it’s
important that the Iraqis understand how much better off they are now, under
our supervision. And we’ll rape and beat as many of them as we have to to get
that point across.”
The president also addressed the matter of responsibility in this snafu,
disclosing in no uncertain terms that he had verbally reprimanded Secretary of
Defense Donald Rumsfeld over the incident. He explained that “I called Don
into my office and I told him I was displeased that I hadn’t been informed of
these incidences earlier. If he had told me about them in advance that my head
would be in a noose over this, I would have been better prepared to make up
some sort of cock-and-bull story about how these photos were propaganda forged
by the sophisticated syndicates of Osama bin Laden’s Al Queda network in
cahoots with the Kerry campaign and Jane Fonda. Unfortunately, I never had
that opportunity. So I told Rumsfeld I was mad. He lunged at me and tried to
eat my neck. I curled up into a ball on the floor and pretended to sob
uncontrollably until he left the room in disgust. All in all, I think we had a
good talk and I consider the matter completely resolved. From now on, it’s
official. No more torturing, sodomizing or pornographizing Iraqi prisoners.
But we still get to piss on them. I mean, after it all . . . September 11th.
It’s only fair.”
Beyond that, however, the president affirmed his faith in Secretary Rumsfeld,
asserting that “Donald is a good Secretary of Defense. He’s led us through two
wars and we successfully managed to pretend we won both of them without
actually accomplishing anything remotely resembling progress in either. That’s
pretty good. Besides, there’s a rumor going around the halls of the White
House that if we fire Donald Rumsfeld, it will greatly displease Satan. And as
you well know, Satan’s support, both financially and diplomatically, is of
great importance in this time of crisis. I would hate to jeopardize that. The
last thing we need is for Satan to unleash a rain of furious hellfire and
black damnation on the world. I would hate for our apocalypse to have to
compete with his.”
In spite of Bush’s support for his Secretary of Defense, Congressional leaders
on both sides are calling for heads and Rumsfeld’s is the top order. This
week, the Senate passed a unanimous condemnation of the alleged abuses. Though
it was mostly a symbolic gesture, it increased pressure on the president to
take some meaningful action on the matter. Donald Rumsfeld spoke on his own
behalf this week, assessing that “I had a good run. If this is the end of my
career, I take comfort in knowing that wherever I go, whatever I do, I’ll
always be in a position to kill lots of people. And even if I’m not, I have
gotten the opportunity to kill a lot of people to date. That’s important. A
man has to make his mark on the world. Anyway, about the abuses, on one hand,
they are terrible. They don’t reflect well on our great military and they
don’t reflect well on the United States. But on the other hand, I really don’t
care a whole lot. It’s not as though it’s a revelation that we do terrible
things to Iraqis while we’re keeping them as prisoners in their own country.
It’s actually pretty consistent with the way we’ve handled this war to begin
with. The point is, if it were up to me, those photographs would be sold in
the Adult Erotic Entertainment section of the bookstore.”
So this week, as more photographs are surfacing, and violence in Iraq
continues to escalate, the Bush administration is struggling to find a
solution. Though the officers who are alleged to be guilty of these abuses are
scheduled for court martial, there are the difficult issues of systemic
liability to consider. The prison guards have claimed, for their defense, that
these abuses were militarily encouraged methods of preparation for
interrogation. Secretary Rumsfeld has asserted that “we do not encourage these
methods of detainment. We just give loaded automatic weapons to a bunch of
psychosexually disturbed, brain-dead, corn-pokin’ hicks and assume that
they’ll have the initiative to employ these methods of detainment. Frankly, I
think you should be impressed that these mongoloid retards even know how to
open a camera shutter. ”
While President Bush expressed more vocal remorse about the abuses, he was
also careful to remind Americans that “this is not my fault at all. When I
decided that we needed to make up a bunch of bullshit about why we should
conquer this country so we could dismantle its central government, reduce its
infrastructure to smoldering rubble and steal its greatest economic resource,
I did it with the best of intentions. I never imagined that bad things would
happen to the Iraqi people. If there was some way I could make it up to the
Iraqis, I would. But I’m very slow-witted so I can’t come up with any ideas.
So I guess the best thing to do is to continue my occupation and hostile
economic takeover. It may be inhumane and against the best interests of the
United States, Iraq and the world at large, but at least you can’t figure all
that out just by looking at a photograph.”
And remember, as always, the monkey goes where the wind blows. |
