Salon on the war and the political left’s silence

Posted by Pierre Igot in: Society
April 5th, 2003 • 6:29 pm

How to think about this war if you’re against it” by Joan Walsh, Salon

I hope for a U.S. victory with minimum bloodshed and maximum freedom for the Iraqi people. But I also want the cakewalk conservatives to pay for their hubris politically.

The most astounding part of it is probably this:

In a dishonest piece of writing in the Weekly Standard this week, “The War for Liberalism,” cakewalk conservative William Kristol described the Democrats as divided between brave “Dick Gephardt liberals,” the “patriots” who back the war-supporting former minority leader, and the despicable “Dominique de Villepin left,” — there’s the French slur again, after the foreign minister who led the U.N. opposition to Bush’s war — whose adherents “hate conservatives with a passion that seems to burn brighter than their love of America, and so, like M. de Villepin, they can barely bring themselves to call for an American victory.”

(My emphasis.)

In case Mr. Kristol didn’t realize it, Mr. de Villepin is the foreign minister of a conservative government himself! It is really quite astounding that American pundits can demonstrate so much ignorance about international politics — and get away with it. Using “de Villepin” and “left” in the same phrase is a politically mind-boggling stretch.

I suppose that this essentially means that anyone who opposes the current US administration in any respect is a leftist. With such a black and white vision of the world, is it any wonder that everybody perceives the US administration as arrogant and ignorant?


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