Abu Ghraib vs. Mapplethorpe

[SuperScout]

Most of you probably remember, albeit with reasonable disgust, the fight between some conservative Senators and the National Endowment for the Arts, and the latter's funding degrading photography by Robert Mapplethorpe. Remember the photographs, with bullwhip handles protruding from men's anus, and the liberals insisting that this was "art"?

Even the patrician Daniel Patrick Moynihan, defending the waste of taxpayer money for pornography, and usually given to rational and reasonable thoughts, intoned, "Do we really want it to be recorded that the Senate of the United States is so insensible to the traditions of liberty in our land, so fearful of what is different and new and intentionally disturbing, so anxious to record our timidity that we would sanction institutions for acting precisely as they are meant to act?" This begs the question: why should we sanction, much less finance, something that is 'intentionally disturbing'? How can the liberals justify, excuse, and subsidize the pornography of Mapplethorpe, yet get all exercised over the photographs of stacked Jihadists?

Notice Moynihan's words: "intentionally disturbing." The Senate back then could handle disturbing images and even felt dutybound to use taxpayer dollars to pick up the tab for them. Who knows, perhaps the photos from Abu Ghraib will reappear as modern art at one of the museums the senators have patronized over the years.

In their ongoing experiment against common sense, the left wanted a military less elite and more egalitarian, and got it. But they won't take any responsibility for the effects of their experimentation on the military. Now the game is to pin the problems at the highest level, including the SecDef and up, and to de-emphasize the depravity of the individual wrongdoers. Notice the politically correct way the press has treated Janis Karpinski, enabling her to play the victim. She claims that she was given responsbility for the prison, but not what went on inside. Even a stupid 2LT knows better than to accept responsibility for things over which he has no control, and to let a bridgadier general use that as an excuse and as an alibi is to stretch the imagination over a 55-gallon barrel. Time to start increasing hemp production for the ropes needed.