Dominic:

This is not exactly a fight between equals. Whether or not Galloway is scum
is rather beside the point--until now his clout was purely tabloid. The
Senate, on the other hand, accused a bunch of people, most of them
unlikely, of corruption at best, while offering not a shred of evidence.
Why bother with proof when you can ruin the lives of your opponents, or at
the very least force them into a lot of legal expenses?  This was the old
McCarthy routine, and it stinks of the worst kind of abuse of power. Unless
the Senate produces the evidence it won't work, but it can't be pleasant
for the accusations to be plastered all over the front pages of the world.

Galloway did us all a favor by not sitting still for it.

The Democratic Party is not without its faults, but this sort of tactic
appears to be a Republican specialty.

After the taking of Beziers in the Albigensian Crusade Simon de Montfort
gave the oder to slaughter every man woman and child. God, he said, would
sort the righteous from the heretics afterwards. Stalin would have been
proud. So might those in power now.

Jeez, I wish I could go through a day without being ashamed of my government.

Mark


At 11:22 AM 5/19/2005, you wrote:
>Kamm mistaken for Hitchens. Bet it happens all the time...
>
>The attempt to whip up a stink about UN misappropriation of
>Oil-for-food funds does look somewhat like a smokescreen (call it a
>stink bomb) to cover up for US sanctions-busting. It also provides an
>opportunity for unilateralists to undermine the legitimacy of the UN
>itself. But they picked a poor target in Galloway, who's already won
>two libel cases against newspapers who tried to smear him with
>similarly ill-supported stuff...
>
>But I take it for granted that the Republicans are lying shits. It's
>not even worth pointing out, at least not in a climate where many
>people (albeit a minority in the larger population) will automatically
>agree with almost anything bad that's said about the US administration
>irrespective of its evidential basis, or even plausibility. The reason
>I focus on lying shits like Galloway instead is that they often get a
>free pass in the same climate, just because the stripes of their
>warpaint are pointing in the right direction.
>
>Dominic