O treason most vile!

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Golly, liberals really love to call the cops, don’t they?

It seems that just about everybody I know is mad as a wet hen about the Republican senators’ childish, fatuous letter to the ayatollahs. A bizarre legal curiosity called the Logan Act has been exhumed — by liberals! — from two hundred years’ worth of well-deserved oblivion. Charges of treason are being proffered, prosecution demanded, garments torn, hair set afire….

Not surprisingly, the most insightful, rational, and adult response I have seen to the senators’ silly letter came from the heir of an ancient and sophisticated civilization, namely Iranian foreign minister Javad Zarif, who was kind enough to give this imbecile stunt more careful consideration than it deserved from anybody.

Perhaps hysteria evokes hysteria. As the Republican loons increasingly take flight from reality, it appears that their liberal counterparts feel obliged to keep pace.

It’s a depressing spectacle to see the enlightened, well-educated libs and the ignorant, obscurantist Yahoo flat-earthers scrambling for the same brass ring. Who’s the traitor? Who’s the patriot? Who’s the law-breaker, who the law-enforcer?

Of course one expects reactionaries to call people traitors — it’s a fundamentally reactionary concept — but it says something about the latent physiognomy of liberals when they show themselves so eager to do the same. There are, of course, precedents: see for example the American postwar Red Scares, organized respectively under the Wilson and Truman administrations.

One cannot, of course, leave this topic without observing that there are exactly two parties whose noses would be put out of joint by a rapprochement between the US and Iran: namely, Saudi Arabia and Israel.

10 thoughts on “O treason most vile!

  1. Another insightful and rational opinion from a person in that part of the world who has been at the receiving end of Western Civilization for some time now (as Gandhi quipped “it would be a very good idea.”):

    If the Labor Party wins, it will not be so good. There is not much difference between Labor and Likud, and we actually prefer Likud. The Labor Party has better public relations in the world, but they do the same things. They do not promote peace, they build settlements and walls and make wars, but they get legitimacy for this from the world. For us in the Occupied Territories, Lieberman is probably best, as he together with Netanyahu damages Israeli foreign affairs … We don’t want Labor, as we don’t want another Peres who will just help to ease the pressure on Israel.

    • Plausible reading, and one I share. Bibi and Avi are the truest “faces” of the Zionist State. A Labor win will surely dampen, or at least postpone, international outrage, just as surely as Obama’s victory put a Liberal Hopeychangey wet blanket on class conflict right when it was ripe and propitious. Liberals do have a history or riding in to “save the day.”

      I expect much crowing from “liberal” and “reform” Zionists should Labor win — and of course the immiseration will continue apace.

      • Likud has actually often been better than Labor in its treatment of both Palestinians and non-European Jews. For instance, they legally ended torture of Palestinian prisoners when they brought to an end 30 years of Labor rule in 1978, largely on the basis of votes by Mizrahi (“Oriental”) Jews. American Conservatives have also often been less blinkered than leading lights of the Left on this issue:

        One of the ideological puzzles of the Ron Paul campaign is the fact that the best line on Iran and Israel from any of the candidates, by far, has come from an isolationist libertarian Republican from Texas. And the most impressive president on the Israel-Palestine issue was Dwight Eisenhower…Recently a friend pointed me to the fact that the right-wing publisher Regnery put out two books in the 1950s that had a more clear-eyed view of the conflict than any American publications beside the work of anti-Zionist rabbi Elmer Berger. Regnery published They are Human Too, a wrenching book of pictures of the Palestinian refugees…Bottom line: for whatever reason, cultural or political, American right-wingers have done some of the best thinking on the Israel Palestine issue.

        Gandhi, himself a deeply religious tradition-worshiping upper-caste Hindu was also far clearer in the first half of 20’th century than even contemporary paragons of the Libertarian Left like Noam Chomsky manage to be in the 21’st century on the rights and wrongs of the racially exclusive settler colonial project:

        Palestine belongs to the Arabs in the same sense that England belongs to the English or France to the French. It is wrong and inhuman to impose the Jews on the Arabs…Surely it would be a crime against humanity to reduce the proud Arabs so that Palestine can be restored to the Jews partly or wholly as their national home.

        Also, a long account of how JSIL (“Jewish State in the Levant” as Max Blumenthal calls it) was for decades the toast of Social Democrat Liberals in Western Europe and North America.

    • “The upcoming elections don’t promise anything, are hardly about anything, and the fact that I’m writing here again means there isn’t much new to write about.”

      The SMBIVA thesis applies pretty much everywhere, doesn’t it?

  2. You’re reading my mind, Smiff. The GOP’s nasty-assed snarling — from all accounts written with a Sharpie on a ripped-out sheet of spiral notebook paper with some algebra notes on the back — may have been vile, but the Liberals’ pants-pissing reaction made it even more entertaining.

    For some reason, it puts me in mind of one of my favorite scenes from one of my favorite old early ’60s horror flicks:
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i8H-r0_vmOQ

    When establishment Liberals and Conservatives get into a catfight, who wins?
    The American voting public!

    • Well, I won’t get *that* out of my mind’s eye anytime soon.

      As catfights go, this is a great deal better than anything Congress has to offer.

    • Favorite line:

      “The paths of experimentation twist and turn through mountains of miscalculation and lose themselves in error and darkness!”

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