The Vatican’s Abu Ghraib?

I thought that conservative essayist Christopher Buckley (at the DailyBeast.com) had the clearest and tartest response to Pope Benedict’s lifting of excommunication on Holocaust denier, Bishop Richard Williamson:

What—the fuck—were you thinking of, Your Holiness? This repugnant episode is surely to the Vatican what Abu Ghraib was to the Pentagon. No, actually, worse.

And below is the nutball Bishop Williamson calmly and dispassionately (which makes it all the more creepy) explaining to a Swedish interviewer his Antisemitism and Holocaust denial. Feel the love:

For a point by point rebuttal of Williamson-like Holocaust denial (by the historian Michael Shermer), as well as a clear explanation of how professional historians (and not whack jobs) arrive at reasoned historical judgments based on converging lines of evidence, I recommend this book (published by the University of California Press) here.

Holocaust denial is, of course, of the same intellectual status as young earth creationism and moon landing denial; that is, it has no serious standing among professional, academically trained historians or scientists, but it nevertheless sustains a large and eccentric conspiracy-consuming crank following.