Air America Cues Up The Prez

I was out of range of my usual talk radio station today, which led to me stumbling onto Air America, where I heard the end of one show and the beginning of another. The subject, of course, was President Bush's speech, which was still a couple hours away.

Arabs are too dumb to want freedom. That was the message of the first show; an amazing thing to hear from the Left, which supposedly is all about human rights, freedom and the human spirit soaring to be free. The messaging started when a Bush voter called in and was promptly called an "ass." When it turned out the caller was not exactly doctrinaire in his support of Bush, the host chided him for not learning from history -- history that teaches us that there has never been a successful democracy in the Arab world, and therefore there never will be.

Ignoring the fact that there are Arab democracies (Turkey, Lebanon and in a way, Israel), the idiocy and racism of the statement is breathtaking. There never was a Democracy until America; so is Democracy the sole purview of white Eurocentric cultures? The Japanese, Taiwanese and Koreans seemed to have picked it up. Are Asians better than the Arabs? How about the Indians? Blacks ... well, true black democracies are rare to nonexistent in Africa, so I guess Air America probably feels that blacks are incapable of wanting freedom and democracy, too. They'd better not say that to their listeners.

The war is only about WMDs. The second show started with a long lead-in about WMDs, full of quotes Rumsfield and Bush probably wish they could take back today. The point was obvious: The war is about WMDs, there are no WMDs, therefore the war is illegal, false, a sham, a run for oil, the Bush/Nazi connection, whatever.

World War I was about the assassination of a Balkan royal. Is that why we fought it? World War II was about kicking butt after our Pacific Fleet was bombed. But is that why we fought it? Vietnam was about a destroyer being shelled in the Gulf of Tonkin. But is that why we fought it?

Iraq is about being left no options by a despot who was starving his people. It's about stopping a guy from creating (with oil-for-food money) and using (again) WMDs. It's about destabilizing the current, and unacceptable political reality in the middle east. It's about North Korea, Iran and keeping the terrorists there instead of fighting them here.

So, in other others, Air America was about what I expected it to be.