Some days I worry...

...that my outrage meter has been spiked once to often. I scan the stories that are stoking the fires of other bloggers and the newswires, and I feel nothing. Condi's a liar? Ho. The White House planted a shill in the press corps? Hum. The Bush budget screws his friends and foes alike? Wake me when it's over...

Then, sure enough, they go after my band of brothers again, I get blue in the face, reach for a keyboard and my outrage meter is reset for action. Here's the latest restorative outrage...

WASHINGTON — The latest chapter in the legal history of torture is being written by American pilots who were beaten and abused by Iraqis during the 1991 Persian Gulf War. And it has taken a strange twist.

The Bush administration is fighting the former prisoners of war in court, trying to prevent them from collecting nearly $1 billion from Iraq that a federal judge awarded them as compensation for their torture at the hands of Saddam Hussein's regime.

The rationale: Today's Iraqis are good guys, and they need the money.

And you thought the Bushco approval of torture was just for our side. But no, it's the Buscho compensation plan that's just for their side...

Many of the pilots were tortured in the same Iraqi prison, Abu Ghraib, where American soldiers abused Iraqis 15 months ago. Those Iraqi victims, Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld has said, deserve compensation from the United States.

But the American victims of Iraqi torturers are not entitled to similar payments from Iraq, the U.S. government says.

Bush hates veterans. He just does. It's so obvious.

And he doesn't care about you, either.