verging on random

America at war

May 6, 2011 on 9:54 pm | In Uncategorized | No Comments

I never know how to take The American Spectator. It’s tempting to think it’s a kind of conservatively-slanted version of The Onion … you know, satire written so cleverly that unless you know it’s meant to be satire, you couldn’t really be sure if it was serious or not.

Then other things hit you and you realise these people aren’t writing with a sly giggle at all … they mean every word. Which is decidedly troubling.

Latest exhibit: assassinating Osama bin Laden is exactly the same situation for President Obama as killing Hitler was for Churchill in 1945. Now this is so barmy that nobody could possibly take it seriously, except obviously the Spectator crowd think it’s the height of sophisticated political analysis. With lots of pointless references to the royal wedding thrown in to boot.

Anyway let’s look at the comparisons:

Osama bin Laden	Adolf Hitler
Homeless terrorist, power derived from private family wealth	Chancellor of Germany
Gained influence helping guerrillas in Afghanistan resist Russian occupation	Gained influence as leader of a mainstream political party contesting elections
May or may not have been able to tell a few hundred ragtag terrorists what to do	Commander-in-chief of the armed forces of one of the most powerful nations of his era
Got lucky in 2011 with one terrorist attack committed by  19 members of his small covert organisation; immediately went into hiding and has done nothing of note since	Directed the build-up to a military campaign of conventional warfare aimed at conquering Europe; at the peak of his power oversaw an empire extending from the English Channel to Egypt, Norway and the Caucasus
Assassinated by American soldiers; body dumped at sea	Committed suicide when faced with inevitable defeat; body never recovered

Apart from those minor discrepancies, the similarities are plain spooky.

The main point of the Spectator’s idiotic piece, needless to say, is that nothing that happened this week will interfere with the irresistible conservative march to retake the White House from that Kenyan clown in 2012.

What really pisses me off is that I don’t know how to get work writing for these pissant right wing publications. There seems to be an endless number of them, the work requires minimal talent, presumably it pays a living wage, and I can’t get a piece of the action. Bugger.