During the furor over Columbine, what pissed me off the most were the endless invocations of the most heated Culture War rhetoric imaginable.

On the left, the endless meme (epitomized by Michael Moore) was that the United States is a violent society, a culture of guns. The kids were simply products of that. Mindless automatons doing what they'd been programmed to do in evil America.

On the right, the meme was along the lines of a "climate" created by the anything-goes, 1960s generation. A culture of nihilism so terrible that the boys were simply a product of it.

Each side blamed the "climate" created by the other for the actions of two deranged young psychopaths.

In Iraq we have more than two young psychopaths who have behaved in a manner consistent with their pathology.

Not my pathology. Not something created in the 1960s. Not the gun culture Michael Moore loves to hate. Not the "military culture" -- which is the main reason the culprits (led by a civilian prison guard) were discovered and the reason this has not been covered up.

I didn't do it, you did not do it, the hundreds of thousands of honorable military service members did not do it. There is no collective guilt for which we must atone. The psychos (and those in charge who were negligent) should be punished severely for their (not "our") crimes.

But I am deeply worried that somehow the Culture War will be insinuated into this once the finger-waggers start screaming about how "American society" is somehow to blame.

That's because I have seen it before. First comes the shock. And then, along with the anger, the fingers start to wag.....

I only hope I am wrong.

It's late on Friday night, and I have been helping out a dying friend so I haven't had time to blog. I am too weary to research this as I should. I am afraid that what I might find would cause me to lose my temper and be unable to sleep.

I wish the ideologues would keep their Culture War in the privacy of their own bedrooms, homes, and families and not try to use every terrible incident to come along for political advantage.

Because once it starts, there's no stopping it.

UPDATE: It didn't take long. This nauseating piece is already setting the tone:

Why are we surprised at their racism, their brutality, their sheer callousness towards Arabs? Those American soldiers in Saddam's old prison at Abu Ghraib, those young British squaddies in Basra came -- as soldiers often come -- from towns and cities where race hatred has a home: Tennessee and Lancashire.

I guess we should ask the author, a guy named Robert Fisk.... He says it's all about "we."

Must "we" read his garbage?

UPDATE: Roger L. Simon's post and comment thread intrigues me to no end. Timing is everything. (FDR's rule of coincidence always comes to mind.)

I am just a lowly blogger, but I have to assume that someone, somewhere, has researched the background of the psychos involved in the torture....

I hate to generalize, but prison guards have a disproportionate number of notoriously corrupt individuals.

Were I looking for a few rotten apples, I'd know where to find them.

(After all, if the U.N. can be bought, why, there's plenty more where that came from!)