Ferrablog

The National Review's blog, The Corner, is just providing too much material to ignore today.

Let's start with this title of this piece by torture supporter John "Kick one for me" Derbyshire. Before reading the text, I could have sworn he was describing George W. Bush.

Then, Rich Lowry blasts Slate's Tim Noah for quoting him out of context:

Over at Slate, Tim Noah hits me from as he puts it, “Blame[ing] Quentin Tarantino” for Abu Ghraib. To support his case, he quotes this paragraph from my column earlier this week: "Consider the iconic film of the 1990s, Quentin Tarantino's Pulp Fiction. It includes a scene of the rape of a man imprisoned and kept as a sexual slave, which prompted laughs in theaters. The victim, 'The Gimp,' became a figure of fun. Tarantino's latest, the Kill Bill movies, present the same romance of power and violence, arbitrarily and stylishly wielded. Cruelty, Tarantino tells us, can be fun."

The very next sentence, which Noah didn’t see fit to quote is this one: “This is not to say that the filmmaker, or anyone besides those who committed and condoned the acts, is in any way responsible for Abu Ghraib.” That would seem at least, uh, to complicate Noah’s case that I’m “Blame[ing] Quentin Tarantino.”

While what Lowry says is technically true, he's trying to be too cute by half with this disclaimer. If his disclaimer is true, then why did he even bring up Quentin Tarantino in the first place, unless he was trying to assign some blame. Lowry made it a point to state that Tarantino tells us "cruelty can be fun". Additionally, Lowry couldn't even get the character of "The Gimp" right, as he acknowledged:

A final note: I messed up that scene from Pulp Fiction. It’s apparently not The Gimp who gets raped, although he is kept as a sexual slave.

Hell, that's not even right - the Gimp is a buddy of Maynard and Zed in their lair of torture.

Next, Lowry approvingly quotes the following Email and titles it "A Call for Carl Levin to resign":

E-mail: "I was so furious at Carl Levin for questioning Rumsfeld in that self-righteous way that I tried to find out about prison conditions in Michigan. I found out that in 1996, Michigan was one of five states investigated by Human Rights Watch which found out about sexual assault and other abuses by the prison guards. Though I live in Ohio, I wrote Carl Levin suggesting that maybe the prison guards had raped women prisoners on his orders, since he was trying to imply during his questioning of the Secretary of Defense that Rumsfeld and President Bush must have given the orders for the Iraq prison guards to abuse the prisoners."

Aside from the specious comparative reasoning involved here, the fact is that Levin is a federal officer - one of Michigan's two U.S. Senators. Therefore, he is no position of authority over the political apparatus of the State of Michigan. The proper analogy to Bush would be to Jennifer Granholm, the Governor of Michigan, and to Rumsfeld, the head of the state Department of Corrections. Levin has nothing to do with the prison conditions in Michigan, nor is he in any way responsible for them, ultimately or otherwise.