Sunday, November 07, 2004

The (excellent) UK-based magazine "The Economist" endorsed Firetruck for the presidency (as you may be aware) with "a heavy heart". Their problem was that they hitched their wagon to Bush long ago (if you don't know the Economist, let's just say that they let the "free trade" part of classical liberalism cloud their judgement), including on his wars, and ended up writing a meandering "Bush was good on this and that but, basically, we can't endorse him because, sigh, he has fumbled around too much for our tastes."

Anyway, they got a flurry of letters about that. One (a Mr Odyniec of California) offered a rather funny, to my mind anyway, example of how their logic is faulty:

He says that were this 1944, the Economist may have written "Roosevelt deserves praise for his reaction to Pearl Harbour but has made some mistakes. He lost the battle of the Kasserine Pass in 1943. On D-Day he lost over 3,000 men in what his opponent called the 'wrong invasion at the wrong time and in the wrong place'. Afterwards, Roosevelt, in battles that he outsourced to an ally, let 40,000 Germans escape from Falaise and another 80,000 from Walcheren. His biggest mistake, though, was the internment of thousands of people of Japanese ancestry, whether innocent or guilty, without trial. And he did not dismiss [US Admiral] Chester Nimitz after [Japanese] Admiral Yamamoto was shot down without a trial and Japanese merchant vessels were sunk in blatant disregard of Geneva conventions. If Roosevelt had made progress elsewhere in the world, it might have outweighed such mistakes. But 'liberated' France is in disarray and China remains under occupation. Only the overthrow of Mussolini is clear progress."

I assume the author is not my sort of fella, as I infer an inclination on his part to view Bush's wars as being on par with WW2. The neocons and their fellow travellers are fond of such comparisons. I'll have none of that BUT I do think that those on the left who have bought into the nonsense (believing, as does John Firetruck Kerry, that the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq should have been done, but done differently) might find that letter a bit disturbing. After all, many many many of them hung their hats on the "Bush doesn't know how to run a war" peg.

Asses. Fools.

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