Tuesday, May 11, 2004

Signorile

On Limbaugh:

Another conservative finger-pointer seemed to get Rush Limbaugh all hot and sweaty during his week-long quest to downplay the images as nothing more than college fratboy games. Donna M. Hughes, on National Review online, asked, "Why are we shocked by these images from Abu Ghraib, but when the victims are women (or gay men) the images are called pornography or 'adult entertainment'?" Yes, she was attempting to explain and excuse the behavior—and give anti-porn crusader John Ashroft more grist for his twisted mill—by claiming that the reservists might have engaged in these acts of torture because they'd seen them played out in porn films. (Of course, according to that logic we should ban The Passion of the Christ, because if people played out the sadomasochistic scenes in that film, we'd be taking down bloody crosses from every street corner.)

That got Limbaugh thinking and making some lurid confessions: "If you look at these pictures, you cannot deny that there are elements of homoeroticism …I've seen things like this on American websites. You can find these if you have the passwords to these various porn sites, you can see things like this. And [Hughes'] point was maybe these kids—the soldiers, the guards, whoever, who are of a certain age group, who've grown up with access to this are simply acting out what they've seen on these websites or something, just for the fun of it, or maybe other reasons."

Another crackpot deflection regarding the brutality, to be sure. But now we also know what Limbaugh was doing on those oxycontin-dazed nights: fumbling for his passwords, looking for those homoerotic websites. Live and learn.