Torture Memos Show Bush Targeted Toddler Story Time

(FiniteTimes.com) – The present administration announced today that it is preparing to release another round of potentially embarrassing torture memos, perhaps as early as next week. These new memos claim to show the extent to which the Bush administration was willing to go to garner acceptance for its “enhanced interrogation techniques”, both in the present and the future.

“They say that history is written by the victor? Well, in this case, the attempt was to see the future written by Doctor Seuss,” says Charles Seymour, head of the independent Children’s Literature Anti-Political Initiative (CLAPI). “This was a shameful attempt to pervert an entire generation into accepting torture and inoculating it to believe torture to be OK.”

CLAPI points to a number of classic children’s books that quietly underwent a rewrite during the last year of the Bush administration. Publishers who were approached by the White House’s Office of Enhanced Juvenile Information were asked to alter such children’s classics as The Little Engine That Could and The Pokey Little Puppy.

While most publishers eventually succumbed to CLAPI pressure and pulled the updated books from production, a few of the “re-imagined classics” can still be found on bookshelves.

“It’s still possible to find a copy of Smack The Bunny if you look hard enough, but there are a lot of examples out there that are less obvious cheerleaders of torture that we still haven’t gotten the publishers to pull,” Seymour says. He holds up a couple of books.

“You won’t find a wolf anywhere in this copy of Little Red Riding Hood, but you will find a sleeper cell hunkered down in Grandma’s bedroom, a little girl with a flair for martial arts, and a violence and gore level that we find unacceptable.

“And remember in The Grinch Who Stole Christmas, where they all gather around singing ‘wah hoo forest’ and eating roast beast? Gone. Now the Grinch is waterboarded by the Whos as Cindy Lou looks on, cigarette dangling from her mouth, two thumbs up. I mean, smoking? What sort of message are we sending our children?”

A brief scroll through the New York Times Children’s Bestsellers list shows that Seymour and his organization still have an uphill battle when it comes to removing some Bush era rewrites. This week, Cricket, Y’All Will Talk is at #12, while Goodnight Moon, Wake The Fuck Up Abdul has cracked the top 10 at #7.

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