Mysterious

I don’t get this. A reader responds to this post (documenting the fact that a significant aspect of our casus belli for war with Iraq–namely, the phony Iraq/Al-Quaeda link–was a fiction obtained through torture) with this mysterious complaint:

Mark, this is a very troublesome post. You don’t approve of waterboarding. Ok. I understand what you’re saying but to be sarcastic as to our reasons for going to war? That really offends me. Saying that there was a link between Iraq and al Queda and getting sarcastic about it was…disappointing. (not the first word that comes to mind but it will do)

Mark, I really respected you and your blog. This whole tone is obnoxious and beneath you and your posters.

Sean O’Kane and his “neo-cons” rant is also obnoxious.

What is it with you guys? I thought this blog was going to be Christian-in-nature, intelligent, thought-provoking…

Several things come to mind, the first being Tom Kreitzberg’s hilarious rejoinder to my amazement about how people seem to get far more upset about failure to keep the conventions, than about failure to keep the commandments:

There is also often an expression of betrayal of personal trust: “I’d expect such comments from these people, but to hear it from you, Mark, of whom I think so highly… I really expected more of you. I’m not even angry, just… just sad.”

Because the subject under discussion isn’t the grave evil the U.S. administration did with the formal cooperation of large numbers of U.S. Catholics, but the effect Mark Shea’s comment has on some pseudonymous person he’s never met.

The second thing that comes to mind is simply wonderment at what my reader is objecting to. Did I get anything wrong? No. Is it not a fact that the “evidence” Powell gave for a Saddam/Al-Quaeda connection was obtained by torture? Yes. So what’s the problem? As near as I can tell from the text, my reader just doesn’t like to hear it and is offended that I am “sarcastic about our reasons for going to war”–as if that’s worse than, you know, lying about the evidence for going into a war and killing thousands of people, or lying that “torture works” when the evidence is piling up that it “works” only if, by “works” we mean “gets the prisoner to say what we want him to”.

The third puzzlement is that I am somehow joined at the hip with Sean O’Kane, as though any post I do not delete is ipso facto my opinion too. Given that I am not deleting the post criticizing me for allowing O’Kane’s post, I must be one messed up dude.

Finally, there is the curious notion that criticizing torture and the false fruits it bears is neither “Christian-in-nature, intelligent, nor thought-provoking”….

I got nothing. How do you reply to that? Where to begin?