THOSE PHOTOS AND THE TIMELINE:

THOSE PHOTOS AND THE TIMELINE: One of the effects of seeing new photos of the torture at Camp Bucca and Abu Ghraib on The Drudge Report is the subliminal feeling that this is going on right now.

It isn’t–but the timeline is more than a little confusing, especially if you’re coming into this scandal cold (or get all of your news from Drudge). Fortunately, Mudville Gazette has a timeline of the events–all of which took place last year. By December or January, these incidents were reported, not by the media, but by a courageous US soldier—and stopped.

That doesn’t excuse them. And as Charles Johnson notes, what our soldiers did, while abusive–and un-American, pales in comparison with Saddam’s unspeakable methods–most of which, as Robert Cox wrote, were literally unspeakable by most of the US media–they went unreported by CNN and the rest of the media.

Mudville’s timetable was found via James Lileks, who writes:

The minute I heard Biden refer to Rumsfeld with the magic words – “what did he know, and when did he know it?” – I knew that the Iraqi POW story had jumped the shark. Or rather jumped a pyramid of blindfolded, homoerotic sharks. It’s not the question, it’s the words: use of the Vietnam and Watergate era terms are like an incarnation that will topple the current administration. I almost expect someone to ask whether there is a cancer on the presidency, a chancre, or a weeping mole. Stop it! STOP LIVING IN THE PAST!

What really bastes my brisket (did I just write that? I need a beer.) is the constant desire to return us to the nadir of the post-war era. They want us to think: quagmire. They want us to think: Nixonian scandal. How inspirational. How Churchillian. I have nothing to offer the American people but blood, sweat and Billy Beer.

Speaking of the bad old ’70s, as Jonah Goldberg, and this mock commercial note, what we did also pales in comparison with what Navy Reservist John Kerry claimed to the Senate about what he and his fellow soldiers did in Vietnam.