Tom Tomorrow says:

If you listen to Limbaugh or Hannity, you’ll learn pretty quickly that the right wing party line on Haditha is that we should not “rush to judgment.” By discussing the case as it unfolds, by printing information clearly supplied to them by military sources, the media are apparently making it impossible for Our Troops Who Are Defending Our Freedom to get a fair trial.

Because of course you know how Limbaugh and Hannity and Fox News never, ever engage in speculation or discuss any ongoing legal case of any sort until such case has been fairly resolved in a court of law.

(The strategy here is obviously to try to run out the clock — defer any discussion of the actual issue until enough time has passed that they can switch into “that’s old news, nobody cares about that anymore” mode….)

Yup.  The U.S. military slaughters innocent Iraqis in cold blood in Haditha, and part of the right-wing response is to act like they don’t know all the facts.  Since when did the swiftboating right become fair-minded when it comes to accusations? 

The other prong of the right-wing response to Haditha, however, is much more nasty and insidious.  Peter Daou writes:

"Michelle Malkin posts an LGF photo of Palestinian children carrying weapons – the implication being? That shooting children is justified?

Glenn Reynolds links to a comment threatening civil war in the US.

At RCP, Jed Babbin writes, "If it were up to Cong. John Murtha, Duke University rape case prosecutor Mike Nifong would be transferred to the Haditha case."

To that I would add the morally bankrupt John Gibson of Fox News, who pointed out that innocent Iraqis are used to being massacred, so why should anyone care when they get massacred by American soldiers?

The Glenn Reynolds argument is particularly vile.  In essence, Reynolds is endorsing this point of view on people who "cry wolf" that the military is committing war atrocities:

The real danger is that we who support the war will reach the point that we say “we might as well be taken as wolves then as sheep”. At that point the left can celebrate that they have made our military and those who support it the people they claim we are. Once that happens however any compunction about respecting them will be gone, and remember one side is armed and one is not.

If you have some doubt as to what that means, Reynolds updates his post with a clarification:

Some people, judging from my email, are misjudging — or deliberately misconstruing — Ingemi’s point. Ingemi’s point, as I took it, is that crying wolf leads in the end to moral callousness, as people assume that there’s no point in behaving morally when they’re going to be called monsters anyway. This seems rather uncontroversially obvious to me.

In other words — since U.S. soldiers and war-supporters will be accused of committing and supporting war atrocities anyway, then they might as well behave just like they are accused.

Jonathan Schwarz puts him in his place:

It would take five years to untangle every strand of his Crazy Yarn, so let me just concentrate on this: what kind of person believes it’s “uncontroversially obvious” that human beings work like this? Read that again: “people assume that there’s no point in behaving morally when they’re going to be called monsters anyway.”

You know, Professor Reynolds is welcome to call me a babykiller every day until the sun explodes. Yet somehow I still won’t come to his house and shoot his children.

This goes to my oft-repeated point that those on the right — many of whom claim to vote their "moral values" — often have no moral values to speak of. 

To my mind, it’s quite simple.  Regardless of one’s views of the war, it is wrong — an absolute wrong — for American soldiers to round up 24 unarmed Iraqis — including 11 women and children — and summarily execute them in cold blood for no reason other than the fact that they are in the same country as the actual enemy.  End of story.  No waffling.  No wringing of hands.  No excuse-making.  No psychobabble about the stress of the American soldier who has to endure "cry wolf"s.  It’s an absolute moral wrong.  Period.

UPDATE:  O’Reilly outdoes them all — see related post above.