The Machinery of Night

Posted 8:40 AM by Angie Schultz

Travesty Intentional

[Yeah, it's a lame title. Tough.]

Jkrank requests (in email) that I comment upon Amnesty International. I told him I didn't have anything to say, but that was before I saw Bill "Spells His Name Wrong" Schulz's post at the HuffPo.

I have been meaning to poke fun at the Huffers, but, really, that gives whole new meaning to "shooting fish in a barrel". More like using a thermonuclear device on a Filet-O-Fish. Also, I have no idea who half those people are, and that takes some of the fun out of it.

I know who Schulz is, though; he's the Executive Director of Amnesty International USA. See, says so right there. Doesn't say anything else, so I'm guessing he must've sprung full-grown from the head of Kofi Annan sometime in the recent past.

And he's still defending his stupid Gitmo Equals Gulag assertion:

It's been a wild three weeks for Amnesty International and me, what with our international Secretary General, Irene Khan, having called Guantanamo Bay the "gulag of our times...We've taken a lot of heat for what we repeatedly said [after they got called on it] was intended as a symbolic, not literal, analogy.

I would have thought it would have been physically impossible for an executive of a major NGO to be as tone deaf as this:

...the use of that one word "gulag" had a remarkable impact on the public debate. Amnesty got more media time to discuss US detention policies in the past three weeks than we have in the past three years.

In other words, We shot our credibility to shit, but it's OK 'cause it got us on TV. T! V! I can't spell it out more clearly than that, people!

So if, for example, I were to say that Amnesty International was actually a front organization for a shadowy group who are working on an army of Hitler clones -- and that furthermore the leadership of AI all drive their SUVs to the non-union market to pick up a load of whale filets and Palestinian children to take to their wild parties at the Neverland Ranch (and I mean that in a purely symbolic, not literal, way) -- then it would be OK as long as I was able to spark a debate on whether words mean things anymore.

So, when will Fox News be calling me?