From The Ghost of Howard Beale:

It's time to play... Who Said It?

"We need a president that represents the values we try to teach our children: integrity, accountability, and responsibility. And that's simply no longer possible. The president says he wants to be responsible, but he doesn't want to accept any consequences. Responsibility and consequence go together. That's one of the things that is inevitable. And this president has, in effect, resigned... He's resigned his responsibility to be accountable."

Answer: John Ashcroft

Nice catch. I'm sure there are a lot of Clinton-era quotes that would be useful to dig up here, chief among them Atrios' favorite, 'What will we tell the children?'

If it was so awful trying to explain a mere "blowjob", how much more outraged must Republican parents be now that they have to explain "abusing someone until they'll pretend they're giving a blowjob"? Where are the scandalized Republican parents now, that's what I'd like to know...

Elsewhere, drug addict Rush Limbaugh is playing down the torture in Abu Ghreib as mere hijinks, in fact a necessary "blowing off of steam". No, it's not a joke:

Wonkette, quoting from Rush's site

RUSH [after a caller remarked that the "stack [of] naked men" was "like a college fraternity prank"]: Exactly. Exactly my point! This is no different than what happens at the skull and bones initiation and we're going to ruin people's lives over it and we're going to hamper our military effort, and then we are going to really hammer them because they had a good time. You know, these people are being fired at every day. I'm talking about people having a good time, these people, you ever heard of emotional release? You ever heard of need to blow some steam off?

There's more: World o' Crap: Sick, Sick, Sick

RUSH: You know, if you really look at these pictures, I mean I don't know if it's just me but it looks like anything you'd see Madonna or Britney Spears do on stage. Maybe you can get an NEA grant for something like this. I mean this is something you can see at Lincoln Center from an NEA grant, maybe on Sex in the City: the Movie. I mean, it's just me.

...CALLER: What if they did that on our soil to our citizens, would it still be considered --
RUSH: Have you heard of 9/11 and the three airplanes that flew into the World Trade Center, the Pentagon, and that landed in the field in Pittsburgh?
CALLER: Why do we always have to go back to 9/11?
RUSH: Because that's what this is all about. What do you think this is about?

...RUSH: Now, as to my original point that these torture photos, that you can see this on stage at a Britney Spears or Madonna concert any day of the week, I stand by it.

Gee, I guess the concepts of 'consent' and 'faux torture vs. real torture' are quaint pre-9/11isms to Rush and his listeners. Charming. But at least Rush still believes in the privacy of his own medical records -- that's sacrosanct!. Making him get in a naked pile of fellow inmates? That, he'd overlook.

Given the hue and cry over a mere hyperlink from the John Kerry weblog to The Daily Kos, maybe we can all agree that the Vice President of the United States shouldn't grant interviews to this lunatic ever again?

Can we regain some honor and dignity, please?