Zap! Pow!
The trouble with American journalism, in short, isn't that it's too skeptical, but that it's too willing to throw skepticism to the wind when it suits the agenda of proclaiming every war a Vietnam and every Republican president a Nixon.
[James Taranto]
There is a real sense of deja vu in reading this. I wrote about this kind of thing in the 70s when reporting on the way Civil Guards interrogated Basque prisoners and read about it in Amnesty International reports on Spain and the Basques. The specific techniques may have differed but the unchecked brutality and tacit government support via notable inaction was the same.
The Franco government showed its true colors by looking the other way. Do we?
[Joe Gandelman]
Jon has revised and updated his 2002 defense of the Empire. This time he makes sure to blast the Jedi for being "oligarchs" who do nothing to defend democracy. Moreover, he asks how a supposedly good Republic could tolerate legalized slavery on planets such as Tatooine. Jon still makes his point about order, but I'd say this is very much a post-Iraq, more purely neo-con defense of the Empire. Not that there's anything wrong with that!
[David Adesnik]
So if the modern world savages whatever mixed-up-but-good-hearted or beautiful-yet-powerless ideal I happen to find, I just savage their darlings right back. That's the great thing about post-modernism: the liberals don't kill you for being "irrational" anymore (at least when they're being honest). We are all supposed to admit that value systems are charades and private fetishes, so a good liberal must submit to being made to tolerate a counter-revolutionary savaging of his own darlings every now and again to prove he's no Robespierre.
[Old Oligarch]
