America’s Little PR Problem

( – promoted by buhdydharma )

Wow, this Oval Office is pretty cool.

Hey, guys, listen up. We’ve got a little PR problem. Not a big one. Hey, we’re America, right? We’re too big to fail. We can weather this storm. This wasn’t on our watch. But, guys, listen up, we cannot release those pictures from Abu Ghraib. And it’s not about endangering the troops, though use that old canard if you want, what endangers our troops is being a troop in occupied territory, but guys, Mr. President, please, these photos, raping kids in front of their parents and the like, well, sirs, it just wouldn’t go down well with, well, with anyone with a conscience.

These photos prove one thing; “ick, sick, dick,” which is German for Eww!. And yeah, while the snapshots are good to blackmail the little camel jockeys, pardon my French, in the photos once they get back to their villages and you show the Tribal Elders little Mohammad straddling little Ali and oops bye-bye Mohammed and Ali, but it’s not so good for our image you know. And as Andre Agassi said, Image is Everything.

America is beloved all around the world and these photos could enflame anti-American sentiment and THAT is not acceptable. The world doesn’t care if we, in our pursuit of extremist terrorist America haters, we kill a few score of innocent people a day. It’s expected. Collateral damage is chic. Why else do we pursue it so feverishly? But, sirs, what was conceived by the mind of the Frick and Frack torture experts makes inhumanity look like charity.

So here is what we do. We do what every good government does; we obfuscate, delay and deny. Now, Mr. President, this is especially difficult for you as, you know, you promised all this change and stuff, good move there, but this change we cannot tolerate. There might be riots in the streets and the burning of American flags all over the world and while this is good business for the American Flag manufacturers in China, it’s not good for our image.

Now, sir, you know more about image than any politician since, uh, well, sir, the previous president’s chief advisor, may the Lord save them all from The Hague, and you cannot undermisestimate the damage to our image as the world’s beacon of truth, justice and integrity, albeit a tiny bit tainted by the silly water-boarding thing, and the silly wars under false pretenses thing and of course the Truth thing which the previous administration was so adept at hiding at all costs – good on them – but sir, these photos, sir, these photos portray evil being done to the evil-doers, except, sir, almost all of them are completely innocent.

Well, perhaps not completely, sir. They are Arabs and Muslims and Jihadists and by definition in the post-911 world this makes them guilty by religion and region, but sir, these photographs, which looks like they were dreamed up by Caligula and Freddy Kreuger, instead of our own vaunted CIA, US Military, paramilitary contractors, Rumsfeld, Cheney and the producers of The Fear Factor – these photos go beyond acceptable brutality, bondage and bestiality, which, you know can be sexy if you’re from Georgia. But, billions of people around the world in their frenzied over-imaginative heads will switch out the victims, uh sorry, terrorists, in these photos with their own children, wives and brothers. Empathy is the enemy, sir.

We’ve all heard the phrase a picture is worth a thousand words. Well these pictures are absolutely biblical in their verbosity. Talking about torture is one thing, but a shot of a woman being sodomized by a gun barrel is the kind of thing not even Goldman Sachs can recover from.

Now, you’re going to take a lot of flack, sir, from the ACLU, Amnesty International, the International Red Cross, Greenpeace and the lesbians from Code-Pink. But sir, these are all far left, Gay & Marxist organizations and we can make broad inferences about National Security and, uh, you know proprietary information about our torture techniques, which have saved billions of lives all around the world from Osama bin Laden, who is probably dead but has lots of wives and kids roaming the world looking to shore-up his legacy. He attacked us sir. And his ghost is still out there. And anyway sir, these are Arab Muslims whose first sexual experience is probably with a sheep or a goat or whatever else they herd over there. To them this isn’t torture as much as foreplay sir.

Well that’s about it sir. America doesn’t torture and these photos prove it as long as they are not released.