… Air America, and Liberals Still Playing “Nice”
Today, Al was playing choice cuts of Rush’s idiotic, morally debauched rationalizations for torture at Abu Ghraib and Gitmo. A pointless exercise, since Dittohead Mark thinks any criticism of the military is picking out the negative instead of accenting the positive. He insisted, practically demanded, that instead of emphasizing the occasional bad thing the military’s doing in Iraq–you know, like wiping out entire wedding parties–Al should come up with one positive item a day from Iraq. And not be sarcastic about it either, Mark added.
At which point I would told Mark to open a high window and go fly. But Al, being nicer than most, kept his rumpled cool.
So this is where we are in 2004. Conservatives not only dictate the terms of debate from their side, but dictate how the other side should conduct itself (i.e., like eunuchs). Liberals would never bother pestering Rush or Ann Coulter to acknowledge one positive achievement of liberalism or feminism a day, because they know they’d only get a dismissive get-lost in return. But conservative have no hesitation in lecturing liberals on how to discuss the war in Iraq, even though all of the power in Washington is now concentrated in Republican hands and liberal Democrats haven’t the slightest input into the decision-making process.
Al should have told his dittohead friend that it’s too damned late to be sprinking sugar on the mound of corpses mounting in Iraq, but instead he persisted in this exercise in futility, trying to persuade someone who’s unpersuadable, winkle a mind that’s proudly, defiantly clam-shut. It really is liberal masochism trying to find common ground with someone who believes liberals barely deserve to occupy the same earth. Dittohead Mark might concede a minor point here or there, but he’s never going to budge on the big dumb positions his hero Rush holds dear, and using his powers of reason on a sensibility so inert is a waste of Al’s breath, and a waste of the listener’s time.
… the exoneration of George Galloway, a British MP (whom the right-wing called, wrongly, “Saddam’s Little Helper”)
The Telegraph did me and the anti-war movement an injustice and the judge held it to account. But the Blair government - which used the Telegraph’s assault to force me out of a Labour party I’d served for 36 years - has committed an incomparably greater injustice. Iraq was invaded on trumped-up charges. As a result, an estimated 100,000 Iraqis have died; the lives of millions more have been wrecked. This week we learned the conditions of child health in a land occupied are now even worse than during the killing years of sanctions. Yet not a single government minister has fallen. No official has been sacked. Alastair Campbell has become a highly paid raconteur and talk show host. John Scarlett, unblushing, has been promoted to head the Secret Intelligence Service. The guilty men in Whitehall and Westminster remain unpunished.
Now the stain on my name has been removed, I intend to step up my efforts, with others both inside and outside parliament, to harry and hold to account those responsible for the crimes of the Iraq war.”