He's certainly got the face for radio.
Posted on 02/02/2005 9:23:43 AM PST by anniegetyourgun
Let's pick up where I left off: It is highly unlikely that I will be voting Republican for president in 2008, no matter what happens in Iraq.
But my suggestion to the contrary was the only statement made in Tuesday's column, "What if Bush has been right about Iraq all along?", that I didn't sincerely mean.
I feel the need to offer that clarification because those who read this space regularly are familiar with my tendency toward sarcasm, but Tuesday's column reached a whole other level of readers out there in cyberspace who have never seen a Mark Brown column but took a surprisingly strong interest in my reaction to the Iraq elections.
For most of the day, their e-mails have been rolling in here at a rate of about four per minute -- which comes to 240 per hour. While that has tapered off as day turns to night, my new e-mail alert is still clicking every minute.
'You are an idiot'
I consider this mostly a nuisance because the bulk of the correspondence is from out-of-towners who don't buy the Chicago Sun-Times, in effect, drowning out the voice of the Chicago readers who pay for the privilege of letting me know how irritating they find my views.
I'll never find time to read all this mail, the mixed tenor of which can be judged from the subject headings: "The Dumbest Column Ever Written," "Your intellectual honesty an inspiration," "You are an idiot," "A profile in courage," "Craven sell-out," "You're totally right," "How naive can you be?" and "Hats off to you!" But I promise to try to print a batch later this week.
The reaction certainly has made for a most unusual day, the strangest part coming when I heard from family and friends that Rush Limbaugh was quoting from the column and remarking favorably about it.
Regular readers will find it shocking that I even have family or friends who listen to Limbaugh, but as the governor of Illinois can tell you, there is no accounting for family, and I have too few friends to let politics get in the way.
Premise of war was still faulty
As you might guess, Limbaugh is not one of my heroes, and it pains me to give him succor. I lean more toward Molly Ivins, who no doubt would have taken my Tuesday column and carved it to shreds while keeping a sense of humor about it, had she taken any notice at all.
So the attention makes me more than a little uncomfortable, and I'm still trying to figure out what to make of it as I fend off interview requests from bi-coastal radio talk show hosts and Fox News. And sure, I left out some important points such as the faulty premise on which the war was sold -- the old weapons of mass destruction.
This is no time for further waffling, however, so I stand behind what I wrote, the gist of which, if you're wondering what the fuss is about, was that the sight of Iraqis embracing their right to vote forced me to re-examine my views on the war and to seriously consider the possibility that President Bush will succeed with his Iraq strategy and was right to take us to war.
If you read the column, you'd know I didn't totally flip-flop, but I opened that door, which is apparently so unusual these days that it merited attention from Rush and the Drudge Report and an entire world that I rarely visit, as well as inspiring fellow liberals to want to drum me out of the corps.
Politics' sad state of affairs
I'm glad I wrote the column, though, even if I'm wrong, because it helped bring into focus something else that I've been wanting to say for a long time, which is that it's a sad state of affairs in our politics when people are so locked into being in one camp or the other that they can't review the evidence as it presents itself and adjust their thinking accordingly.
How else can you explain some local columnist with liberal intentions drawing so much interest just because he wondered aloud that maybe he had been wrong and that the other side had been right?
I don't ever want to be one of those columnists -- or commentators -- who just take all the information they receive and hammer it into their pre-conceived notion of the truth.
If I did, I'd do radio.
"There is some justice in one charge that is frequently leveled against the United States, and more generally against the West: Middle Easterners frequently complain that the West judges them by different and lower standards than it does Europeans and Americans, both in what is expected of them and what they may expect, in terms of their economic well-being and their political freedom. They assert that Western spokesmen repeatedly overlook or even defend actions and support rulers that they would not tolerate in their own countries.
...But there is nevertheless a widespread [Western] perception that there are significant differences bewtween the advanced Western world and the rest, notably the peoples of Islam, and that these latter are in some ways different, with the tacit assumption that they are inferior. The most flagrant violations of civil rights, political freedom, and even human decency are disregarded or glossed over, and crimes against humanity, which in a European or American country would evoke a storm of outrage, are seen as normal and even acceptable.
...The underlying assumption in all this is that these people are incapable of running a democratic society and have neither concern nor capacity for human decency."
p104-5, The Crisis of Islam, Bernard Lewis
A proud fence sitter!
"I'm glad I wrote the column, though, even if I'm wrong, because it helped bring into focus something else that I've been wanting to say for a long time, which is that it's a sad state of affairs in our politics when people are so locked into being in one camp or the other that they can't review the evidence as it presents itself and adjust their thinking accordingly."
Well said..and to all of us.
Rush is going on about this right now.
He's certainly got the face for radio.
Unfortunately, if you read the column, the man is changing his "thinking" because BUSH is succeeding, not because he thinks that BUSH may be right. The original article title is misleading. What he is doing is "rooting for the front runner" because he wants to be on the right side of history for popularity sake.
FYI..our good friend, PJ-Comix, is at present dumpster diving over at DU trying to see if there was any response over there to this column. Or checking with Chicago FD to see if theyv'e burned his house down yet..
Success the best evidence of being right.
And the MSM claims not to be insular in their thinking! By the end of the week, this columnist will be apologizing for having visited the "dark side" of his brain and claiming to be bi-polar.
So I guess the Libs being successful at making abortion legal is right.
So you finally paid attention to what Bush and millions of others have been saying for, oh, three years. What took you so long? (Answer: Intransigent liberalism.)
As for Molly Ivins, she could only rip your column if she could crib off someone else's criticism, so wait til a few other people comment and she can "borrow" their writing.
RUSH is talking about this article right now.
What's his email address? I'd like to add my two cents...from Georgia. My passive aggressive behavior will be well-suited to continuing to annoy mark brown.
This is IMO the nut of the article and something ALL of them and us must take note of without losing the focus on principles as the prime determinate of political philosophy..
Faulty logic. If they thought they could suceed in legalizing abortion they were right. That doesn't make the goal noble. Brown's assertion only works if both sides agree that the goal (freeing Iraq) was noble. And they do.
I would agree that mentioning Rush will continue the "attention" that this guy is apparently starved for.
But my suggestion to the contrary was the only statement made in Tuesday's column,", What if Bush has been right about Iraq all along?" that I didn't sincerely mean.
Which both sides are you talking about that agree that freeing Iraq was noble?
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