noticed the outrage being demonstrated by our media mavens over the treatment given those British sailors and marines?

They were blindfolded and told they might be jailed for 7 years...and released in 14 days.

For Christ's sake, THEY WEREN'T EVEN WATERBOARDED!

and yet.....CNN and MSNBC are discussing whether Geneva Conventions have been violated and our own administration is complaining about their treatment.

There's a reason no one respects this country's ideals any more and that reason is that we have none.

LGF Inquiry

Relatively on topic: I am in a bit of a spat with the only neocon-friendly writer at Reason (and his supporters), who has posted an idiotic compendium of media criticism of Pelosi and actually approvingly links to LGF and commends its comments section. That's all going on here: http://www.reason.com/blog/show/119545.html#comments

If anyone has a link to a concise discussion of the heinousness of the LGF comments section, please let me know (Johnson has cleansed wiki, the entry on him is virtual hagiography). That site went batshit insane over Pelosi's headscarf, and refused to admit how absurd that is in light of the fact that even Laura Bush hijabs herself when visiting mosques. In any case, I could make use of intelligent dissections of LGF and its comments section.

Any kind of "ideal" government would have among its basic requirements:

a) not promoting genocide

b) allowing people to use bleach

I don't see what the search for an "ideal government" has to do with the current post of Glenn's, except as a way of serving as evidence for the curious psychology of authoritarians. Confronted with a coherent argument, Shooter's response is to change the subject.

Pretty typical.

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.

Note how sloppy the right is, in their use of the term "WMD". I don't think chlorine tanks are Weapons of Mass Destruction. Many chemical weapons, improvised and not improvised, don't qualify as "WMDs". Iraqi chemical artillery shells used in the Iran-Iraq war were not "WMD". These were tactical chemical weapons that simply do not match the WMD definition.

And yet, the need is very great to find ANYTHING that might be foisted on the american people as WMDs. In response, right-wing apologists have become very flexible in their definition and use of the term, when it comes to the arsenals of other contries, or of "terrorists".

When discussing our own arsenal of weapons of course, a completely different yardstick is to be used.

The right wingers sure do hate it when they are called Nazis, but boy do they ever love using that Nazi lingo.

Pretty typical.

-- Whispers

Tsk. I'm absorbing what RWA is and why it's bad. Do you folks have something better to offer? If so, what? Or would you rather just continue to scare each other with tales of conservative chicanery?

If you think having something better, is off topic and not worth expressing, I'll have to take you at your word.

I had not read Rosenberg's essay before. It certainly lays out the problem with a welcome exactitude.

Seems to me you can't have an argument with people like this. They won't listen to you. And if you do have an argument with them (or discussion, or debate), they will never be convinced that their views are nonsensical...or fascist.

So, if there's nothing to be done about people like this...I guess it's necessary to sway those who are not yet RWAs, yes?

Of course. And, prior to Gitmo and Abu Graib, torture and Military Commissions Act, wiretapping w/out warrant and renditions, other nations might have listened to our press and our government on such issues.

But our government's observations on Geneva Conventions and human civil liberties are not of interest to anyone now. Not to other nation states, and not to most of its own citizens. Sure, our state department can pop-off about it, as can the president, or legislator, or press. But no one with any sense of decency will be listening.

The UK asked us to stay out of the issue--very wisely (they declined our kind offer to buzz Iranian vessels with our military aircraft, for example). We should comply with the UK's wishes, and shut the hell up.