Politics: Mea Culpa McGrory
That buffoon Andrew Sullivan decides to trash Mary McGrory in today's screed. Unfortunately for Sully, he's an idiot. And he doesn't have the journalistic credibility to rinse Mary McGrory's pantyhose in his sink let alone sit there on the page grinning like a fool and panning McGrory's change of heart on an Iraq war.
McGrory published a column (which I referred to in a disagreeing but not disrespectful manner here) after Colin Powell's excruciating and humiliating final relinquishment of his dignity at the UN last month. McGrory said that she was persuaded by Powell's half-truths and meaningless gesturing that Iraq wasn't totally innocent in the matter of weapons of mass destruction. Her exact words (helpfully cited by Sullivan, who apparently can't engineer a takedown without inadvertently giving his target lots of credit) were "I'm not ready for war yet. But Colin Powell has convinced me that it might be the only way to stop a fiend..."
This is where I think McGrory (and a lot of other columnists, opinion leaders and mindless American drooling gibbons who can't differentiate supporting American troops from blindly following our leaders to war) lost the point. Saddam Hussein has always been a bad, bad man. He was a bad man when we sold him a lot of the chemical weapons we now want destroyed. He was a bad man when we collaborated with him in what we saw as a war against a worse man, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini. In the devastating accounting of how bad a person must be to deserve attention from a massive, sleeping, lazy, lone superpower like the United States, Hussein was actually pretty high on the list back then, and has kept himself high by invading Kuwait, igniting that emirate's oil fields on exit, and continuing to terrorize people inside his own country even while Iraq was regarded as an international pariah state.
But none of this is new. And none of it should be news. The biggest gas attacks on the Kurds took place in March, 1988. That same 15 year period includes Saddam Hussein's savage attacks on the Marsh Arabs and other Shi'ite groups in the southern part of Iraq who didn't agree with "The Great Uncle," as Hussein likes to be called. Nothing new here.
But there was Colin Powell! He convinced Mary McGrory! He's got such an earnest face! How could he lie to us, and convince so many of our columnists and right-wing ideologues?!?
I can't answer why he momentarily convinced so many people. Magically, Sullivan knows what was in McGrory's mind at the time, and now knows (though her recent column explaining the switch gives no indication) that she changed her mind because she was afraid of getting voted off the op-ed page by her loyal readers. The funny thing is that Mary McGrory has been on that page longer than Andrew Sullivan has been drawing breath on this blue earth. McGrory's story about the re-shift -- that she heard from a lot of readers, that she kept her mind open about subsequent developments in the news, that she is capable of change because indeed that sort of critical thought is what separates us from right-wing ideologues and the gibbons -- is perfectly acceptable.
McGrory acknowledges, by way of contrast with President Bush, that she did offend her base with her earlier column. She demonstrates what moved her to belief in Powell's first speech, and she cites what moved her back to skepticism in the letters, and events that have transpired since that address to the U.N. Oddly, Sully goes to the trouble of defending (lest he be accused of hypocrisy later) the right of an informed columnist or blogger like him- or myself to change their minds and regret something they wrote. He ascertains, though, that McGrory did something quite different. He proves nothing of the sort, and in the process he reveals himself to be a fiercely partisan, utterly close-minded simpleton, whose should be careful in his decisions to cravenly attack -- rather than respectfully criticize -- columnists whose Pulitzer Prize he isn't fit to polish.
That buffoon Andrew Sullivan decides to trash Mary McGrory in today's screed. Unfortunately for Sully, he's an idiot. And he doesn't have the journalistic credibility to rinse Mary McGrory's pantyhose in his sink let alone sit there on the page grinning like a fool and panning McGrory's change of heart on an Iraq war.
McGrory published a column (which I referred to in a disagreeing but not disrespectful manner here) after Colin Powell's excruciating and humiliating final relinquishment of his dignity at the UN last month. McGrory said that she was persuaded by Powell's half-truths and meaningless gesturing that Iraq wasn't totally innocent in the matter of weapons of mass destruction. Her exact words (helpfully cited by Sullivan, who apparently can't engineer a takedown without inadvertently giving his target lots of credit) were "I'm not ready for war yet. But Colin Powell has convinced me that it might be the only way to stop a fiend..."
This is where I think McGrory (and a lot of other columnists, opinion leaders and mindless American drooling gibbons who can't differentiate supporting American troops from blindly following our leaders to war) lost the point. Saddam Hussein has always been a bad, bad man. He was a bad man when we sold him a lot of the chemical weapons we now want destroyed. He was a bad man when we collaborated with him in what we saw as a war against a worse man, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini. In the devastating accounting of how bad a person must be to deserve attention from a massive, sleeping, lazy, lone superpower like the United States, Hussein was actually pretty high on the list back then, and has kept himself high by invading Kuwait, igniting that emirate's oil fields on exit, and continuing to terrorize people inside his own country even while Iraq was regarded as an international pariah state.
But none of this is new. And none of it should be news. The biggest gas attacks on the Kurds took place in March, 1988. That same 15 year period includes Saddam Hussein's savage attacks on the Marsh Arabs and other Shi'ite groups in the southern part of Iraq who didn't agree with "The Great Uncle," as Hussein likes to be called. Nothing new here.
But there was Colin Powell! He convinced Mary McGrory! He's got such an earnest face! How could he lie to us, and convince so many of our columnists and right-wing ideologues?!?
I can't answer why he momentarily convinced so many people. Magically, Sullivan knows what was in McGrory's mind at the time, and now knows (though her recent column explaining the switch gives no indication) that she changed her mind because she was afraid of getting voted off the op-ed page by her loyal readers. The funny thing is that Mary McGrory has been on that page longer than Andrew Sullivan has been drawing breath on this blue earth. McGrory's story about the re-shift -- that she heard from a lot of readers, that she kept her mind open about subsequent developments in the news, that she is capable of change because indeed that sort of critical thought is what separates us from right-wing ideologues and the gibbons -- is perfectly acceptable.
McGrory acknowledges, by way of contrast with President Bush, that she did offend her base with her earlier column. She demonstrates what moved her to belief in Powell's first speech, and she cites what moved her back to skepticism in the letters, and events that have transpired since that address to the U.N. Oddly, Sully goes to the trouble of defending (lest he be accused of hypocrisy later) the right of an informed columnist or blogger like him- or myself to change their minds and regret something they wrote. He ascertains, though, that McGrory did something quite different. He proves nothing of the sort, and in the process he reveals himself to be a fiercely partisan, utterly close-minded simpleton, whose should be careful in his decisions to cravenly attack -- rather than respectfully criticize -- columnists whose Pulitzer Prize he isn't fit to polish.
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