More readable goodness

A.M. Rosenthal, a former NY Times writer who strayed from the paper's uniform left-wing (except Safire) view has this to say about his fellow journalists and the Iraq reporting.

Then there is this excellent piece from David Gelertner, a professor who knows more than a little something about terrorists because he was a Unabomber victim. Gelertner really lets the Europeans have it:

The moment we saw those pictures we knew (every last American knew) that the punch in the gut is on the way. People who never cared a damn what Saddam did to his prisoners would be choking back tears of outrage. Americans hold themselves to a higher moral standard, of course. But most Americans suspected that the world's reaction had as much to do with America Hatred as it did with moral standards. We knew that people would forget what we have achieved in Iraq, and what it has cost us in arms and legs and eyes and blood. We knew our enemies would light into America and do their best to turn the world against us and against our troops--whom we had seen risking their lives to liberate Iraq and make it safe--not to mention the
civilians who hazarded life and limb to get clean water flowing, oil pumping, power on, schools open, streets policed, the economy inching forward, and democracy coming steadily closer. We could all anticipate headlines like the one that appeared in the May 8 Irish Times: "The shaming of America. George Bush's boast of shutting down Saddam Hussein's torture chambers in Iraq rings hollow now." We knew our enemies would use those photos to smear our whole Army, our whole Iraq campaign, our whole nation. Much of the world (after all) operates on America Hate the way a car runs on gas or a tick on blood.

"The shaming of America. George Bush's boast of shutting down Saddam Hussein's torture chambers in Iraq rings hollow now." The hell it does. Anyone who equates Saddam's bloody decades of torture and mass murder to the crimes at Abu Ghraib is the same kind of fool who once preached the moral equivalence of America and Soviet Russia, or of America in Vietnam and Hitlerism. Imbecility is eternal, perpetually reincarnated.

(emphases in original).

Gelertner also wisely counsels all Americans to do the one thing that has NOT been an immediate response to the Europeans and Arabs (and idiotic Time magazine covers)condemning us for Abu Ghraib:

We need to hear from America's political leaders, loud and clear: "Yes, we abominate the Abu Ghraib crimes but will not accept your forgetting what America has paid to liberate Iraq, will not allow foreign nations to slander the United States, will not permit you to forget what we and the British have accomplished: a world without Saddam Hussein; a vastly safer, profoundly better world. And no one will be allowed to dishonor American soldiers and this nation by telling us 'you're just as bad as Saddam'; that lie will never go unchallenged."