Who Said This?

I just love this quote, found in an AP story, seen in today's Las Vegas Sun's Beltway News column:

"We've had terrible happenings that have really, really hurt our image of the United States," she said. "And people in the United States are sick about it."

The story was White House Plays Down New Quran Reports, by Deb Reichmann.  In the story, she points out that the original Pentagon news release that verified instances of Quran desecration came out on Friday evening, after the evening news programs.  That would have been in the middle of the night in the Middle East.  In reponse to the Pentagon's mea culpa, Scott McLellan said:

"It is unfortunate that some have chosen to take out of context a few isolated incidents by a few individuals"

McLellan carries a book full of ready excuses, just like an alcoholic who always has an excuse to take a drink.  It's rather pathetic that the best he could do was to fall back on the old standbys of "out of context," and "A few bad apples."  Sure, it is common for things to be reported out of context, but how does that apply here?  The context, by the way, is a prison camp in which people are detained indefinitely, without having been charged with a crime, and live constantly with the threat of inhumane treatment.  If you put the report in that context, does it look any better?  

Likewise, the insistence that the Quran abuse incidents were "isolated," and that they were perpetrated by "a few individuals," is no excuse at all.  They are not isolated; rather, they are a small part of a larger picture of systematic violations of human rights, flouting of international standards of decency, and ineffectual flailings of people desparate to find some kind of justification for an unjust war.  

By the way, the first quoted item in this post was said by our First Lady, Laura Bush.