…the point of these scolds’ political strategy — and it is a political strategy, despite some of its adherents’ quasireligiosity — is clear enough. It is not merely to demonize gays and the usual rogue’s gallery of secularist bogeymen for any American ill but to clear the Bush administration of any culpability for Abu Ghraib, the disaster that may have destroyed its mission in Iraq. If porn or MTV or Howard Stern can be said to have induced a “few bad apples” in one prison to misbehave, then everyone else in the chain of command, from the commander-in-chief down, is off the hook. If the culture war can be cross-wired with the actual war, then the buck will stop not at the Pentagon or the White House but at the Paris Hilton video, or “Mean Girls,” or maybe “Queer Eye for the Straight Guy.”

+ From an opinion article in The New York Times by FRANK RICH entitiled It Was the Porn That Made Them Do It. His premise is that the spin doctors may be shooting to absolve American soldiers and the chain of command via porn and a culture gone askew. -what he states, but perhaps not strong enough, is what this spin would mask over. People in the chain of command gave these soldiers license and influenced the direction their behaviour went. [via: Kirstie]