Reply #13: The kind of logic that made him defend branding students as 'no worse than cigarette burns'

[muriel_volestrangler]

On Sunday, Trudeau's cartoon "Doonesbury" featured fictional character Mark Slackmeyer explaining the President's position against current anti-torture legislation by revisiting a series of 1967 Yale Daily News articles that exposed DKE's rush activities, which at the time included brandings and alleged beatings. Soon after these stories were published, the University's Inter-Fraternity Council fined the fraternity for performing "physically and mentally degrading acts," and the Times published an article in which Bush defended the brandings, comparing them to cigarette burns.

"At the time, it caused quite a stir on campus, even generating some national attention," Trudeau said.

The News article, published Nov. 3, 1967, featured a photograph of a half-inch high "D" burned into a pledge's naked backside. Trudeau drew his first cartoon for the News for the story -- a picture of smiling pledges, naked and bent over at the waist, with a figure holding a DKE branding iron standing over them.

In a News story the next day, Bush is quoted calling the branding "insignificant." He said he did not understand how the News "can assume Yale has to be so haughty not to allow this type of pledging to go on."

http://www.godeke.org/News/PhiAlumnus_GeorgeWBush9.2.htm

And that was the first the world heard of George W. Bush. Bush has always approved of torture. He always will. It may be quite true that he cannot understand people who don't. Torture is a fundamental part of his personality. He gave up drinking; but he could never give up torturing.