Wow.  I don't think I've ever heard anything quite like Blair in front of Congress today.  If his speech had been any more laudatory and celebratory of the good ol' red, white 'n' blue, I would have believed he had applied for US citizenship this morning.  I kept thinking: does Blair really love us all that much, or is Bush really that worried about US public opinion? 

I was also amazed that Blair is standing by the Iraq/Uranium/Niger story.  Curiouser and curiouser. 

The one passage that I keep going back to is:

Can we be sure that terrorism and weapons of mass destruction will join together? Let us say one thing: If we are wrong, we will have destroyed a threat that at its least is responsible for inhuman carnage and suffering. That is something I am confident history will forgive.

But if our critics are wrong, if we are right, as I believe with every fiber of instinct and conviction I have that we are, and we do not act, then we will have hesitated in the face of this menace when we should have given leadership. That is something history will not forgive.

This passage seemed directed at the recent allegations against Bush and co.  And it misses the point.  As do just about every conservative commentator I've read and as did the commentators on NPR immediately following Blair's speech [who interpreted the "Bush lied" allegations as a "re-articulation" "relitigation" of the "should we go to war with Iraq" debate].  

I will make this very plain.  The uproar about whether or not Bush purposefully and knowingly manipulated the "facts," or mislead the public and Congress, while making the case for war is NOT about whether or not the war was in fact a good idea or even a justified pre-emptive strike.  Intention matters a whole hell of a lot in this case.  Even if Bush was factually correct as well as "technically accurate," if he and/or others in the administration knowingly presented false or even questionable intelligence to the public and Congress in order to garner support for the war -- it is still a big deal.  It is still very very wrong.  It is still worthy of investigation and censure and serious repercussions.  It is the action of a totalitarian regime and it is not consistent with democratic principles.   Our entire constitution, our delicate framework of checks and balances, is all predicated in protecting the "right" from the "might."  And this administration seems to be operating on the basis of two central beliefs: "might makes right" and "the end justifies the means".   I assert that these two "principles" are anathema to most Americans and are fundamentally at odds with our democratic tradition.  And I assert that the reason many many Americans -- and the media -- are harping on those 16 words is that we all kind of sense this. 

The scandal is not that US soldiers are still dying in Iraq.  That is tragic.  The scandal is not that we have not yet found any evidence of weapons of mass destruction, nor that the Administration was so abysmally unprepared for leadership once the invasion was complete. That reflects incompetence, and mismanagement.  [And while it is sufficient reason to fire this admin and hire a new one, it still is not quite the point.]  The scandal, the really big deal, the nightmare that keeps me up at night wondering if it really is that bad, is that this adminstration is acting in ways that are truly Orwellian -- and they are getting away with it.  Those 16 little words are only the most recent and publicized example.  They are not the beginning.  And I am very afraid that they are not the end.

8:45:28 PM    

Andrew Sullivan gives us another peek under Ingram's rock.  Evidently he's been at it for awhile. And is quite unabashed.

The investigation of antisemitism in Europe is one that intrigues me in much the same way that I am wrestling with the history and present of racism in the US.   Quite some years ago I was a counselour at summer camp [a zionist teen camp in New York] and we were observing Yom HaShoa [Holocaust Remembrance Day] and watching excerpts from the documentary Shoa.  I remember vividly the interview with Polish citizens who had lived in towns near the death camps.  I remember being deeply chilled by how matter of fact they were about the horrific chapter in history they had witnessed.  And for the first time I truly understood at a visceral level that the history of European anti-semitism was just as ugly and violent as racism in the US. 

Maybe I should explain.  Despite the fact that I am Jewish, my experience of antisemitism in the US has been rather benign and easy to dismiss as the ignorant knee-jerk rants of poor white kids who I knew were getting smacked around by angry frustrated fathers at home.  I had a much keener appreciation of the virulence of racism.  Maybe it was watching Gone with the Wind, or seeing an old black and white photograph of a lynching, or old racist caricatures of slaves, or just studying US history at school -- but I got it.  I got how ugly and evil and creepy and violent racism is -- as it was acted and spoken and felt in the US.   I mean, the evil of it -- when you really let yourself understand what "ordinary" white folk perpetrated against black americans -- the evil of it chills me deeply and primally like a story of ancient horror by Lovecraft.   

In any case, it was in my early twenties -- watching Shoa -- that I first understood that Jews were the target of hate that deep and old and evil as well.  So now I find myself a bit of an anomaly politically.  Firmly on the left in terms of US policies, and firmly on the left in terms of Israeli policy, but I also consider myself a Zionist.  I am in favor of a Palestinian state, yes.  But I am also acutely sensitive to the reality that many "friends" of the Palestinians use [unconsciously or not] legitimate criticism of Israeli policy as a convenient pressure valve for an enmity they have been carrying deep in their bones for centuries.

So Ingram's antisemitism doesn't surprise me.  Only his candor does.

7:41:05 PM