He really said this:

Republican Rep. Christopher Shays, who is in a tough re-election fight, said Friday the Abu Ghraib prison abuses were more about pornography than torture…

…”Now I’ve seen what happened in Abu Ghraib, and Abu Ghraib was not torture,” Shays said at a debate Wednesday.

“It was outrageous, outrageous involvement of National Guard troops from (Maryland) who were involved in a sex ring and they took pictures of soldiers who were naked,” added Shays. “And they did other things that were just outrageous. But it wasn’t torture.”

Oh, and whose fault is it? Why, the liberals, of course! James Wolcott brings us this excerpt from Dinesh D’Souza’s upcoming book, “The Enemy At Home”:

“Although I do not believe that Abu Ghraib reflects America’s predatory intentions toward the Muslim world, I can see why Muslims would see it this way. In one crucial respect, however, the Muslim critics of Abu Ghraib were wrong. Contrary to their assertions, Abu Ghraib did not reflect the shared values of America, it reflected the sexual immodesty of liberal America [my italics]. Lynndie England and Charles Graner were two wretched individuals from red America who were trying to act out the fantasies of Blue America… This was bohemianism, West Virginia-style.”

Wolcott elaborates:

The theme of The Enemy at Home, as in so many conservative tracts, is that whatever goes wrong, liberals and liberalism are always the ones at fault. Conservatives may make mistakes, but their mistakes (such as Bush’s on WMDs and the welcome we would get in Iraq) are well-intentioned and rooted in idealism, not in the moral rot where liberalism pitches its tent. Indeed, when conservatives–heroes in error, to use Ahmed Chalabi’s memorable phrase–go astray, it’s often because they’re following liberals’ lousy example. “In trying to defend the indefensible [at Abu Ghraib], conservatives became cheap apologists for liberal debauchery.” To my knowledge, liberals haven’t been blamed yet for the recent slaughter-execution of Amish schoolgirls, but I suppose it’s only a matter of time before they hang that one on us too.

Words fail me. Thankfully they don’t fail Wolcott.