More political musings:

I went over to Angela’s last night to watch Real Time with Bill Maher. I haven’t had cable, or any TV really, in a long time so I wasn’t really up on the quality of the show. I was very surprised that Noam Chomsky was a guest. Andrew Sullivan attacked Chomsky for his assertion that by the standards of Nuremberg America was guilty of war crimes in Iraq, Chomsky stated that Nuremberg established as tacit that the unprovoked invasion of another country was the greatest of war crimes from which all other crimes, murder etc., are consequent. Sullivan accused Chomsky of being a liar who made millions as a public speaker (when you can’t beat the message attack the messenger). He attacked Bill for not asking Noam tough questions and treating him like some kind of folk hero.

Noam had been asked to comment on the reasons for invading Iraq. He was excellent on “critical leverage” in the central energy production center of the world. Andrew’s response was that if we wanted the oil alone we could have just occupied the oil fields easily. I think that misses the point, “we” (that is American corporate interests) want a puppet state in the form of an indebted democracy, both for access to the energy and continued influence.

Angela on Andrew, “He’ll start to talk in a very reasoned and careful way and you’re going along with him, and then out of nowhere he says these reactionary things with no evidentiary trail leading up to them.” I must admit I was very impressed by Andrew’s initial style of debate and I did go with him on some of his points. He’s an excellent debater. What I enjoyed most about the program was seeing an unscripted argument among many voices that were well informed, well intentioned, and for the most part reasonable. There were a few moments when the debaters weren’t really listening to one another and were arguing against points that hadn’t been made.

Susan Sarandon’s point that voter fraud in Ohio was widespread was disturbing. We’ll be keeping an eye on that.

I had posted some of the harsh letters that have been circulating, but I've decided to remove them.