I know I should really expose the bloodthirsty dirtbags who populate our state's military wing more often, but sometimes it takes an extraordinary piece of outrage (plus the fact that it's Fleet Week here in New York, and the place is swarming with killers) to help me get my thoughts together. The Haditha Massacre that is just being exposed now is awful, but I just assume, despite a Joint Chief's assurances, that this is par for the course in Iraq.

But today I came across a nasty piece of filth from (where else?) Texas, a story about one of the Marines whose death sparked the slaughter of innocent people in Haditha.

The father of a U.S. Marine killed by a roadside bomb in western Iraq in November believes his son's comrades did nothing wrong despite a criminal investigation into events that left more than 20 Iraqi civilians dead, including women and children.

"It's very hard for me, I don't even listen to the news," Martin Terrazas said of reports of the mass killings in Haditha, in Iraq's Anbar province. "The insurgents were hiding in there with the kids."

He doesn't listen to the news, but he knows the insurgents were hiding with the kids. That's because he thinks anything America or its agents do is by definition good. Nuking Japan was good because WE did it. Belgrade's 9/11 was good because WE did it. Butchering a house full of people minding their own business is good because this guy's son's friends did it.

These are the kind of people we are dealing with. You can't reason with them; the only way to neutralize their credibility is to demonstrate to the rest of the rational world that the military is made up of, and backed up by, monsters.