Tuesday, October 10, 2006
Compare and Contrast...
Paul Krugman in the NY Times, October 9, 2006:
- The current right-wing explanation for what went wrong in Iraq closely echoes Joseph McCarthy's explanation for the Communist victory in China, which he said was "the product of a great conspiracy" at home. According to the right, things didn't go wrong because the invasion was a mistake, or because Donald Rumsfeld didn't send enough troops, or because the occupation was riddled with cronyism and corruption. No, it's all because the good guys were stabbed in the back. Democrats, who undermined morale with their negative talk, and the liberal media, which refused to report the good news from Iraq, are responsible for the quagmire.
- See, the problem isn't thousands of years of religious conflict, hundreds of years of colonial occupation, or even decades of brutal dictatorship and reactionary anti-western zealotry -- and it's certainly not the horrendously ignorant, ideologically-driven foreign policy of the neocons who hijacked George Bush's presidency.
No, the problem is anyone who criticizes the Bush administration or their policies. That's what's REALLY motivating the terrorists. If we'd all just get on board the terrorists would "have no reason to attack".
Because they don't think they're fighting a titanic religious struggle that goes back eons -- they're really just reacting to Paul Krugman.
Why do we just know there was some Russian hard-liner spewing this same nonsense while Russians soldiers were up to their armpits in blood in Afghanistan? Or in England, for that matter, while they were mired in this same Iraq.
The blame for this particularly stinky poop-throwing rests squarely on the head of the President himself, for it was he who first slung it, in his State of the Union address.
