The Pendragon's Hall

The NYT made sure to announce today that a GI is being investigated for murder and rape in Iraq. They also made sure to mention this is the fourth time this is happening. For one thing, a quick scan of the history books will inform anyone without a political axe to grind that four instances of murder and rape on the battlefield juxtaposed with the rescues and the handing out of food we have seen by our forces in Iraq could honestly make the case for calling this a Christian war. No other war in history has had less rampages than the one we are currently involved in. Should soldiers guilty of murder and rape be tried and punished? Yes, indeed. But it would be nice if the NYT started extending to our troops the same toleration levels they have for Muslim terrorists. They go out of their way to tell us that hundreds of thousands of Islamic terrorists do not represent the whole of Islam; yet four cases of wayward GI's apparently is a just a polaroid snapshot of the entire US military, government and nation. And where was their concern for murder and rape when describing the crimes of Saddam Hussein or Zarqawi? The double standard to which they hold the world is sickening. Conservatives at least can agree that soldiers guilty of criminal activity should be punished, but we also think that Islamic terrorists should be punished and so should the minions of Saddam Hussein. The Left has no such compunction. Murder and rape is fine when it is a brutal dictator defying the United States or a sitting Democratic president being accused of it. It's only when jumping on the bandwagon will harm American security interests and advance the liberal political agenda that they start to notice rape and murder victims again. All through the 1990s we had liberal activists making great strides to protect violent criminals on death row. We have convictions of proved murderers thrown out because a detective once was in the Klan or a lawyer mention the Ten Commandments. The discovery that maybe, possibly, a murderer on death row was there by accident (something I do not believe to this day) called for a complete moratorium on the death penalty and the release of all these hardened criminals back into society. Michael Dukakis even released a convicted murder who then killed and raped again. When this was brought up in the election of 1988, Republicans were accused of "playing politics" with the poor black man's fate--the murderer, not the victim. The moral high ground has long since been occupied by conservatives; liberals are going to have to change their whole worldview to get anywhere near it again.