I know that will turn out to be way too complex for you but try reading what I have said a couple of times and you may get it. 
Posted on 04/23/2003 6:43:31 AM PDT by Egregious Philbin
Kamiya vs. O'Reilly Salon challenges the bullying Fox host to stop misrepresenting our "Liberation Day" story and debate its author fairly.
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April 23, 2003 | On April 11, Salon published, as its lead article, a piece by executive editor Gary Kamiya. The headline read: "Liberation Day: Even Those Opposed to the War Should Celebrate a Shining Moment in the History of Freedom -- the Fall of Saddam Hussein." The accompanying photograph showed an Iraqi man kissing an American soldier.
Here is the central argument of the article:
"To stand in solidarity with humanity on those few occasions when it lurches forward is more than an honor, it is mandatory if you have a soul, like keeping faith with those you love. And so, at this moment, as the Mordor shadow of Saddam Hussein, a truly evil man who, like a sociopathic murderous husband, killed everything that he could not control, lifts from the long-suffering people of Iraq, all of us, on the left and the right, Democrats and Republicans, America-lovers and America-haters, Syrians and Kuwaitis and Israelis and Palestinians, owe it to our common humanity to stop, put aside -- not forever -- our doubts and our grief and our future fears, and for one deep moment, celebrate."
Kamiya also wrote of the welter of reactions the fall of Baghdad was likely to engender among those who, like him, had opposed the U.S. invasion of Iraq. In one passage, he talked about the "moral schizophrenia" the war induced, and candidly admitted that its opponents -- including himself -- had at times succumbed to the wish that it might not go well for the U.S. He criticized and explored such feelings, tracing them to the fear, held by many who opposed the war, that an easy American success might ultimately lead to imperialist adventures that would be worse for the United States and the world. In the end, however, he disavowed such feelings.
It's a complex argument. You may or may not agree with it. Either way, it deserves to be considered in its entirety.
But why weigh a complex argument when you can seize a brief passage from the article, wrench it out of context and draw blood by entirely misrepresenting it? For the conservative storm troopers who, it seems, have conquered vast territories of the U.S. media under cover of the wartime flag, that's the whole point -- that's what they live for.
And so last week, the organs of the right-wing press in the U.S. -- from the Washington Times to Newsmax to Rush Limbaugh to Bill O'Reilly -- ripped out a small chunk of Kamiya's article and began circulating it to the faithful. The Washington Times said Kamiya was "cheering the enemy." O'Reilly called him a "fanatic" who had "no place in the public arena" and who should "think about moving to Costa Rica." And the wing nut fedayeen of the right crawled out of their base camps at sites like Free Republic to throw spitballs at Salon e-mail accounts and advertisers.
Of course, the real agenda of conservative media's overbearing pundits -- despite their lip service to the marketplace of ideas -- is to drive everyone who disagrees with them out of the public arena. They're not interested in open debate; their goal is to intimidate and silence. If you dare oppose the war, if you dare even admit any ambivalence about it, then you should be gagged and expatriated. In the current climate of mind control, you can't even admit to having entertained thoughts that are not "appropriate," even if you end up rejecting them.
Salon is not a doctrinaire or party-line publication. We have run antiwar pieces and pro-war pieces; we have lauded the antiwar movement and critiqued it, too. We seek the full, free exchange of ideas that is the hallmark of liberal discourse. And we believe that there is still room for, even hunger for, honesty and nuance in political debate.
O'Reilly's show invited Kamiya on to defend his (wildly misrepresented) prose; but anyone who's watched the show knows that it's a hopelessly rigged game, in which the bullying host gives himself carte blanche to outshout his guests. (Although Newsday's Ellis Henican did a great job defending Kamiya's piece from O'Reilly's constant interruptions, and we thank him for that thankless task.)
Instead, we hereby invite O'Reilly to debate Kamiya, one-on-one, via e-mail. Let the unedited exchange become part of the public record on the Net. Let O'Reilly leave the home-turf advantage of his studios. Let's see how he fares when he can't simply yank the mike from a guest who disagrees with him too articulately.
We also invite the public -- left or right, Salon-lovers or -haters -- to read the article that started it all in its entirety. "Liberation Day" was originally published as subscriber-only content, but given the controversy, we are now making it available for all. We're confident that any reasonable-minded reader will find it a very different experience from the "fanatical" treason it has been identified as by the O'Reillys of the world. But like they say at Fox: We report, you decide.
-- The editors of Salon
They like us! They really like us!
I'm guessing that Baghdad Bob is now an editor.
FReepublican Guard? Special FReeces?
"The larger question of the effect of the war on the region, America, and the world, however, is less clear-cut. And it is doubts about this question that have led many of us who oppose the war to that confused state of moral schizophrenia.I have a confession: I have at times, as the war has unfolded, secretly wished for things to go wrong. Wished for the Iraqis to be more nationalistic, to resist longer. Wished for the Arab world to rise up in rage. Wished for all the things we feared would happen. I'm not alone: A number of serious, intelligent, morally sensitive people who oppose the war have told me they have had identical feelings.
Some of this is merely the result of pettiness -- ignoble resentment, partisan hackdom, the desire to be proved right and to prove the likes of Rumsfeld wrong, irritation with the sanitizing, myth-making American media. That part of it I feel guilty about, and disavow. But some of it is something trickier: It's a kind of moral bet-hedging, based on a pessimism not easy to discount, in which one's head and one's heart are at odds.
Many antiwar commentators have argued that once the war started, even those who oppose it must now wish for the quickest, least bloody victory followed by the maximum possible liberation of the Iraqi people. But there is one argument against this: What if you are convinced that an easy victory will ultimately result in a larger moral negative -- four more years of Bush, for example, with attendant disastrous policies, or the betrayal of the Palestinians to eternal occupation, or more imperialist meddling in the Middle East or elsewhere?
Wishing for things to go wrong is the logical corollary of the postulate that the better things go for Bush, the worse they will go for America and the rest of the world. It is based on the belief that every apparent good will turn into its opposite. If this is true, then it would be better for bad things to happen to Bush. But who knows for sure that it is true? Perhaps pro-war leftist Christopher Hitchens was right when he spoke of the "cunning of history" -- perhaps the genius of Historical Progress chose Dick Cheney and Paul Wolfowitz to be its unlikely instruments. Dialectical pessimism is the dirty little secret of the antiwar camp -- dirty because there is something distasteful about wishing for bad outcomes when the future on which those wishes are based is unknown".
I know that will turn out to be way too complex for you but try reading what I have said a couple of times and you may get it.
The argument is simply....Those who wish for more effective defense of Iraq and a prolonged war are Anti-American. I know that will turn out to be way too complex for you but try reading what I have said a couple of times and you may get it
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