Reason #195 the LA Times is Bankrupt

The LA Times parent company is in bankruptcy as we speak. Of course, they've been pretty much bankrupt for years in an editorial and hypocrisy sense but we all knew that.

But today, their editorial board has outdone themselves. Follow the line of thought here:

The release of dozens of new, graphic images of detainees being abused by their American captors would almost certainly reignite international rage. It could lead to an angry backlash in the Middle East and to more jihadi recruits, as the Abu Ghraib photographs did in 2004. It could even lead to new outbursts of violence at a moment when the Obama administration was finally hoping to put the last eight ugly years behind us.

Pretty much what I've been saying up until the last half of the last sentence. Letting these photos be released would kill American service personnel. But then they go far off the rails into the fever swamps of the left:

It's terrible that the president was faced with such an unpalatable choice, but it's just one of the many awful results of the culture of torture and lawlessness put in place by the Bush administration. This country has already alienated allies and seen its moral standing crumble. Now, as we try to get to the bottom of what happened during those years, we have to acknowledge that doing so might put us in further danger.

If some photoshopper created a picture of Bush waterboarding KSM in the Oval Office, the Times would probably run it. Their hatred of Bush runs long and deep. Poor Obama, he's left a difficult decision by the evil Bush junta and has opted wrong. Perhaps if the Times actually vetted Obama, they'd have noted that he's not the best decision maker having voted present most times when he even bothered to vote at all.

Anyway, it gets better:

Photographs are part of the historical record. Think of these images: black men hanging from trees in the American South; emaciated concentration camp survivors; prisoners shackled into cramped "tiger cages" in South Vietnam. Would this be a better world without those photos?

Got that? Waterboarding is akin to lynching blacks, Hitlers concentration camps and the treatment of POW's in Vietnam by the Times' reckoning. Let's see, Jews were systematically exterminated while Abu Zubaydah was waterboarded. They sound exactly the same to me. In the mind of the Times editorial board, they are. Bush was Hitler and Cheney was Robert Byrd or some other KKK'er in their minds. I guess the fact that waterboarding isn't torture and even if it were never was designed to kill or liquidate civilians is beyond their capacity of understanding.

Trying to cover up atrocities because someone might be angry isn't right and won't work. Instead, the Pentagon should release the photos while making it clear that the U.S. repudiates such barbaric behavior and is committed to dismantling the culture that allowed it to occur.

Hasn't Obama spent the last three months apologizing to the world about everything we've done over the last eight years? The Times joins in with the rest of the netroots because these pictures are like porn to them. They get off on America portrayed as evil and that's why they want them released.

I would guess that views like this will ensure the continued slide into irrelevance and eventual dissolving of the paper. Good riddance.