Scouring and scraping

I'm not always right on top of current events, i tend to ruminate on things that catch my attention between tasks in the office. (Yes, i'm sure my employers would love to know that little tidbit, but hell, i've even managed to rattle off blog entries and posts in other blogger's threads while genuinely - and successfully multitasking)

I came across some of the vodka-soaked ramblings of Christopher Hitchens from from a couple of weeks ago in which he tries to call for a more elevated if not necessarily more civil degree of discourse in the debate about the Iraq war while stooping to calling Rep. John Murtha "simple minded" and then, in this gem of a paragraph, equating opponents of little Georgie's War for Oil with the pacifists of WWI and the anti-semitic isolationists who lobbied to keep America out of WWII.

But all right, let's stay with withdrawal. Withdraw to where, exactly? When Jeanette Rankin was speaking so powerfully on Capitol Hill against U.S. entry into World War I, or Sen. W.E. Borah and Charles Lindbergh were making the same earnest case about the remoteness from American concern of the tussles in Central and Eastern Europe in 1936 and 1940, it was possible to believe in the difference between "over here" and "over there." There is not now—as we have good reason to know from the London Underground to the Palestinian diaspora murdered in Amman to the no-go suburbs of France—any such distinction. Has the ludicrous and sinister President Jacques Chirac yet designed his "exit strategy" from the outskirts of Paris? Even Rep. Murtha glimpses his own double-standard futility, however dimly, when he calls for U.S. forces to be based just "over the horizon" in case of need. And what horizon, my dear congressman, might that be?

The big difference, Hitchens, is that unlike our issues with Middle Eastern instability, our government did NOT play a key role in laying the foundations for WWI and WWII by offering direct political and financial support to the same unholy dictators and monsters against whom we went to war.

Except for the Bush family, who coincidentally enough has had their fingers (by way of grandpa Prescott) on the funds that went to Hitler during the rise of the Reich and (by way of Poppy 41) to Saddam, back when he was Ronald Reagan's pet dictator in the region.

But, hey, Hitch... don't let something as inconvenient as history get in the way of a steaming pile of apologetics.