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Blogorrhoea about the
lessons Team Bush ™ is teaching the world:

It seems to Yours Dismally that the lesson Team Shrubya is bent on teaching the world – that no-one messes with the new-improved Uncle Sam – is not the lesson being learned ‘out there’.

What they’re learning out there is that it doesn’t matter what you do or don’t do (Iraq, after all, has neither done nor said anything particularly threatening to anyone – as befits a country whose practical offensive capacity was wiped out years ago).

What they’re learning out there is that you have to be like North Korea.

You have to have nukes.

We don’t need that fascist groove thang.

Nathan Newman asks whether this is offensive:

“If it were not for the strong support of the Cuban community for this embargo with Cuba we would not be doing this…The leaders of the Cuban community are influential enough that they could change the direction of where this is going and I think they should.”

It’s a statement of fact.

So why if you substitute Jews and Middle East issues for the above, it suddenly becomes antisemitism? I don’t think Jews are as united on the issue as Jim Moran argues, but this is not a “Trent Lott moment.” Yeah, it has a vague odor of the “Jewish lobby” power argument, but then AIPAC spends a lot of time bragging about its power.

[…]

So it’s offensive to blacks to compare this lousy, obnoxious political analysis by Moran to Lott’s comments. “Black” opinion gets characterized every frigging day, in incredibly offensive ways much of the time. Moran should get his butt kicked for his comments, but its nothing most other minority groups don’t deal with every day from idiot generalizations based on their race.

Left in the West comments on the supposedly anti-semitic remarks made by Democratic representative James Moran:

This is quite interesting, given that I’ve heard a number of white people and conservatives refer quite openly to “leaders of the Black community”, “leaders of the Hispanic community”, and “stupid atheists.” Granted, Rep. Moran made a mistake in making it sound as if all Jews are (a) powerful; and (b) pro-war. Jews are no more in- line on policy than Catholics or any other denomination. But it would be fair to look at United States and say that, generally, pro-Zionism forces (including Jewish and Christian) have more political strength than anti-Zionism forces. That’s simply a fairly logical subjective opinion about power in the United States. Likewise, it would be fair to say that, generally, dogs are larger than cats. That’s a more clearly provable assumption, but it’s still an assumption.

Regardless, Rep. Moran certainly was not calling for a return to the anti-semitic days of yore; he was not yelling Martin Luther’s vile comments about Judaism in the streets; and he certainly was not saying that the politics of burn, lynch, and wink are acceptable.

Mr. Happy is a bit mean to old Tone:

Blair’s problem is that he can’t bring himself to delegate real authority. We’ve seen this already in his attempts to demasculate devolved government, but it applies just as well to his cabinet colleagues. I guess the idea of trusting people who are, after all, members of the Labour party and therefore immediately suspect, is too horrible for him to contemplate.