Tuesday, July 12, 2005
The Motives Of Conservatives?
Darby Rove's husband in his own words, June 24, 2005:
Juan Cole from today:
But perhaps the most important difference between conservatives and liberals can be found in the area of national security. Conservatives saw the savagery of 9/11 in the attacks and prepared for war. Liberals saw the savagery of the 9/11 attacks and wanted to prepare indictments and offer therapy and understanding for our attackers. [...]Hmmm: "motives," "national security," "terrorists," "defeating our enemies," "treason," "WMD" etc. Are these really concepts that Darby Rove's husband wants to thrust into the spotlight, with him as the supposed standard bearer?
Conservatives saw what happened to us on 9/11 and said we will defeat our enemies. Liberals saw what happened to us and said we must understand our enemies. Conservatives see the United States as a great nation involved in a noble cause of self-defense. Liberals are concerned with what our enemies will think of us and whether every government approves of our actions.
Has there ever been a more revealing moment than this year? When the Democratic senator, Democrat Richard Durbin, speaking on the Senate floor, compared what Americans have done to prisoners in our control in Guantanamo with what was done by Hitler, Stalin and Pol Pot — three of the most brutal and malevolent figures of the 20th century?
Let me put in this in really simple terms. Al Jazeera now broadcasts the words of Sen. Durbin to the Mideast, certainly putting our troops in greater danger. No more needs to be said about the motives of liberals. [emphasis added]
Juan Cole from today:
Whether the courts can and will punish Karl Rove for telling Time Magazine's Matthew Cooper that Joe Wilson's wife was a CIA operative should be beside the point. That's for the courts to decide.If I were the inverted version of Darby Rove's Husband, I might say: "No more needs to be said about the motives of conservatives." But then, I wouldn't have Laura Bush's and Lynne Cheney's husbands to defend and patronize me, or Scott McClellan and Judy Miller to cover my tracks. But more importantly, I wouldn't like what I saw when I looked in the mirror. Perhaps I'm naive, but I think political discourse in our country deserves better - that's what motivates this liberal.
The real question is whether we want a person to occupy a high office in the White House when that person has cynically endangered US national security to take a petty sort of revenge on a whistleblower.[...]
But Rove's revenge on Wilson was the ultimate. Plame was undercover as an employee of a phony energy company. She was actually investigating illegal proliferation of weapons of mass destruction. When Rove blew her cover to the US press, everyone who had ever been seen with her in Africa or Asia was put in extreme danger. It is said that some of her contacts may have been killed. Imagine the setback to the US struggle against weapons of mass destruction proliferation that this represents. Rove marched us off to Iraq, where there weren't any. But he disrupted a major effort by the CIA to fight WMD that really did exist. [emphasis added]
