There's a lot of loose talk on the left about the ideology of Dubya and co. being kinda like the bad guys in World War II. Well, one characteristic of those folks was that they overtly characterized their enemies as subhuman. And I haven't yet seen that this morning from any Republican. I've seen it from the New York Times.

Referring to the long-since-verified stories of female interrogators at Guantanamo smearing menstrual blood on prisoners, and the like, the Times' editorial board has finally decided to take a stand: this must end at once because it is degrading to American women:

Religious conservatives have made their presence felt in so many other parts of the Bush administration, but they have been strangely quiet about these practices. And where are the members of Congress who wring their hands over the issue of women in combat? It's obvious that the Bush administration will never offer a real reckoning on the prisoner abuse, or that the Republican Party will demand one. But surely the dehumanizing of America's military women is a nonpartisan issue.

Apparently more so the dehumanizing of the prisoners, most of whom were picked up in street sweeps in Afghanistan by local thugs that we were paying by the head...