I've been listening to the right try to get this robot meme over for a while now. You see, unless you blow someone's country up and turn it into some warlord chaos hell, it means you don't really care about them and don't appreciate their suffering.

So, for example, plenty of people on the left, center, and right recognize that Zimbabwe would be better off without its idiot dictator Robert Mugabe. (For example, it was the leftist trade union federation COSATU marching against Mugabe in South Africa this week in solidarity with the Zimbabwean trade unions' general strike -- not the international right wing.)

But there are a lot of people who realize, pace Iraq, that Zimbabweans may be worse off if some sort of stupid intervention were carried out which disabled the already fragile dictatorship and precipitated the total collapse which is surely possible. (And similarly, although South Africa's Mbeki is an idiot who seems to like Mugabe, South Africa as a country has to deal with the prospect that a Zimbabwean collapse would lead to millions and millions of refugees, since, unlike the US and UK, South Africa actually borders Zimbabwe.)

Zimbabweans, by the way, also recognize that Mugabe is 83, and they think that will be a factor fairly soon.

But the right wing is desperately, desperately trying to link their willingness to blow a country up and send it down the pike to warlord chaos hell as the new standard of Human Rights appreciation.

I.e., we love you so much, we are so opposed to your suffering, that we, and only we, on the right, are willing to make your situation far worse in an irretrievable fashion.

True nobility comes from deciding that someone else deserves to suffer and risk death for the cause you think just, and if your precipitous actions cause them more pain, suffering, and death, well, it's not your responsibility, because, after all, like Hitchens & co., you *imagined* that it would all work out better for them.

And that's the only responsibility the right wants to take: they *fantasized* that attacking Iraq would yield happiness and justice and pots o'gold. That reality disappointed those on the receiving end of 'liberation' is not the concern of the laptop bombardiers.

Ordinary mortals, unlike right wing ideologues living outside the zone of risk, face tough choices; one of those being that survival may be more likely under a brutal tyrant you hate than under warlord chaos hell.

He actually makes this distinction, though it's really subtle. See, the Ledeen quote starts off with the right wing robot meme that it's all these liberals and leftists who are prejudiced against certain benighted peoples (because they won't blow them up like Ledeen wants).

Then, since Ledeen suggested that some political 'faction' seems to think that these certain 3rd world inhabitants are inferior, Glenn goes ahead and quotes a political faction which explicitly states that these certain 3rd world inhabitants are inferior.

Except, as Glenn points out, though Ledeen's silly slur is indeed analogous to a 'low expectations' argument, in reality, it's the right wing which repeatedly and explicitly argues that these certain 3rd world inhabitants are inferior and deserve death.

So I think Glenn is very aware of what you're saying, and that's the basis of the essay's irony: i.e., Ledeen makes the usual silly right wing suggestion that because liberals and leftists don't rush to advocate blowing some country up, it means they're racists or hierarchalists or something.

Yet the right wingers quoted below Ledeen very explicitly describe those countries' residents as inferior and as targets for genocide.

So, the argument on the right is that because liberals & leftists oppose blowing certain 3rd world peoples up, they're racists, but when right wingers explicitly call for genocide etc. against certain 3rd world peoples, this is somehow not racist & discriminatory.