Urinal humiliation policy leaked

In a barely coherent and historically confused on-air rant, US shock jock Mark Levin tries to enunciate unofficial US military policy in the ‘war on terror’:

Let this be a lesson to every one of you subhumans who plots against America and tries to kill American citizens. We don’t give a damn who you are! We don’t give a damn what you believe! And we don’t give a damn if you’re offended! Because we’re going to hunt you down and kill you and then humiliate you after you’re killed!

Got it?

Yep... got it! — Those marines who urinated on corpses of Taliban fighters they’d just killed are not ‘bad apples’ in an otherwise noble enterprise. No, they’re the embodiment of what Levin and his ilk would like to see as the norm of behaviour in our warrior caste.

But while Levin speaks for the shit-scared and clueless, others such as Sebastian Junger at the Washington Post endeavour to understand what has happened to ‘us’.

I spent a year, off and on, with a platoon of US soldiers in the Korengal Valley of eastern Afghanistan... At one point a Taliban fighter had his leg shot off during a firefight and was crawling around on the hillside, dying, and the men I was with cheered at the sight. That cheer deflated me. I liked these guys tremendously, but that celebration was just so ugly. I didn’t want them to be like that.

I do feel for our warrior caste, being torn as they are between ‘enlightened’ standards, and what people such as Levin “want them to be like.” It’s not enough that they are put in harms’ way in a hopelessly flawed enterprise. They’re also subject to deeply conflicted expectations of cosseted ignoramuses in the media.