Demagoguery of the week

Mr. Secretary, the behavior by Americans at the prison in Iraq is, as we all acknowledge, immoral, intolerable and un-American. It deserves the apology that you have given today and that have been given by others in high positions in our government and our military.

I cannot help but say, however, that those who were responsible for killing 3,000 Americans on September 11th, 2001, never apologized. Those who have killed hundreds of Americans in uniform in Iraq working to liberate Iraq and protect our security have never apologized.

And those who murdered and burned and humiliated four Americans in Fallujah a while ago never received an apology from anybody.

-Sen. Joe Lieberman (D-CT) at the Senate Armed Services Committee hearing with Secretary of War Donald Rumsfeld.

This, ladies and gentlemen, is what's known as a demagogic non sequitur. Which is a fancy of way of saying the senator is full of horse manure.

Almost no one believes Saddam Hussein's regime had anything to do with 11 September; even the president was forced to admit that. And that the particular Iraqi GIs actually tortured by our soldiers were involved in 11 September is almost inconceivable. In other words, 9/11 has nothing to do with American war crimes. That's why it's considered demagoguery. It's the inclusion of an emotional statement that has nothing to do with the question at hand.

When I was getting a haircut this weekend, I heard something similiar to Lieberman. My barber fumed, "They didn't apolgize when they killed all those people in Oklahoma."

I pointed out to him that it was an American, not Iraqis, who blew up the federal building in Oklahoma City and he acknowledged his error. Something like this done by a barber with a high school education can be written off as an honest mistake. When it's done by an educated and experienced senator (who felt qualified enough to run for commander-in-chief), it can only be willful deception.

[My barber also fought in Korea and said of the tortures something like, "It's a different generation. When we were soldiers, we would never have done something like that. You don't do that because of the Geneva Convention." Apparently a humble septugenerian barber has more respect for the Geneva Convention than the administration.]

Lieberman says that the 9/11 killers didn't apologize. He says that Saddam's army didn't apologize. The bad guys didn't apologize: so what?! They're the [insert omninous music] Axis of Evil. We expect nothing of them. America's Crusaders, on the other hand, liberated Iraq with its Army of Goodness in the name of the Forces of Light. We held ourselves to a higher moral standard than those Darth Vader wannabes and the Euro-wimp appeasers.

So when Lieberman says that "what those American soldiers did was immoral but the other guys are immoral too," it hardly fills me with confidence and pride either with our men and women in uniform or with their so-called leaders.

I guess I shouldn't be surprised. Sen. Lieberman has been the only man in Washington who can top the president in the 'self-righteous' category. I suppose the the only thing that makes me rejoice is the knowledge that this demagogue won't be moralizer-in-chief for the next four years.