Here's Michael Kinsley in the Washington Post, joining the Broders and Keillors and Friedmans and all the rest. (link below)

I think what burns me up about this particular approach, echoed by Garrison Keillor the other day, that "we" are all responsible therefore no one can be prosecuted, is that after years of the media downplaying the notion that anything like real torture could actually be happening, they now turn that same mealy-mouthed centrism on the evidence that it did, and say "Well, we all allowed it, so it can't be prosecuted".

Speak for yourself, you pompous cowards. Some people went to jail protesting Bush's wars, even before any evidence about torture appeared.

Just because you, David Broder, Thomas Friedman, didn't take the dangers of letting Bush rage across the world seriously, that doesn't mean that the rest of us didn't. Some of us worked with all our might to stop him.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/04/30/AR2009043003301.html

Speak for yourself, you pompous blowhard.

People went to jail for protesting Bush's wars, let alone for protesting his torture and abuses.

Of course you wouldn't know this because FOX News doesn't report things like that, hell, even CNN doesn't.

Ah well, another myth bites the dust.

Not only that Mussolini didn't do it, but it seems that trains were never really on time at all, despite what the railway claimed.

I'm not surprised, having lived in Italy I can attest that the very idea of "on time" has an entirely different meaning there. I once had someone show up 24 hours late for an appointment. We were supposed to meet at noon and he showed up not until noon the following day, and shrugged that he was "late".

I sort of like the whole thing actually, but it does take some adjustment.

Ironically the most dependable train system by far that I know is the one in France, which of course is a dreaded socialist country in the eyes of the right in the US. You can't get farther from Fascist than that.

Unless you're on the extreme right in the US of course, to whom the two are the same thing. One big ball of bad, and foreign.

Well, good luck with the clue hunting. The passages at the start reek of utter sincerity unfortunately, but then as I hinted before, I could never tell the difference between him and a Pepperidge Farm commercial, it all sounds like the same over- the-top forced sincerity and folksiness to me. I sort of assumed that that was the whole schtick and must be what other people like about him.

I thought that was one of the most ridiculous parts, equating letting torture of five years ago go unprosecuted with things that happened in 1866.

"Oh, it's all in the past, first Dick Cheney, next you'll be wanting to prosecute the Visigoths!"

I thought the article did use "let war crimes be bygones"? i.e., five years ago, leave them in the past.

As for the rest I see your problem, I seem to be in a minority here in that I'm not the least surprised at Keillor's stance here.

You do that at weddings?

Good analogy!

In other words, reminding the bride on her wedding day about the most humiliating day of her life is something that you can't imagine anyone would find innapropriate or obnoxious?

Which you equate with anyone here pointing out that George Bush should be prosecuted if he committed crimes? Both are just innocent and perfectly natural, so who could complain?

You must be as popular at parties as you are here.

Yeah but the expression being parodied here is "let bygones be bygones" which most commonly refers to some argument someone had, right here in the present day. Maybe yesterday, but nothing to do with antiquity or anything dated or quaint.

I appreciate your point actually and it's a good twist on the use here, but it's not what Keillor (or possibly the headline writer) meant at all, and doesn't lend any credence to the idea that this is satire.

Salon slapping on a headline that's entirely out of focus with the article it leads to is nothing new, so there's always that.

The idea that Orwell condoned torture is really the most dishonest hackery imaginable. Orwell never made the statement that Keillor "quotes". Orwell's statement, about those who disavow violence only being able to do so because violent men do it for them, is not the same as the twisted up version attributed to Churchill. In that version, the phrase "Rough men", which Orwell never used, gives the implication of doing things beyond the rules, men about whom you say "who knows what they'll do", whereas "violence" is obviously what happens in war, and we expect it to.

This thing almost began to make sense, in that it seemed like it was going to say "Don't prosecute the little people" but then it veered off into "don't prosecute those who gave the orders" and "don't prosecute those at the top" and in the end, calls for no prosecution whatsoever, which of course leaves only the little people who have already been prosecuted to suffer for what their higher-ups ordered them to do. Which we now know because of those memos.

By the way, there's no way this is satire. Read the first few passages again. It's dead serious. And dead wrong.