ANOTHER GEM FROM THE WRITERS GROUP

[ahbappy85.2]

HOW TO DEMAGOGUE 101

I’m not sure why Vilsack is caving into Republicans on the Iowa budget. If Vilsack wants to demagogue Republicans, the Des Moines Register is providing him with plenty of ideas, including this one.

CASTRO APOLOGISTS AT THE GAZETTE

Somehow I missed this eye-popper in the Cedar Rapids Gazette yesterday. According to the editorial,

[Bush] said the embargo won't be lifted until Fidel Castro releases political prisoners, conducts independently monitored elections and accepts a list of conditions for a "new government that is fully democratic."

Any acknowledgement by the Gazette editorial that, at least in principle, Bush is right? Any mention that Castro is a brutal tyrant who has oppressed the Cuban people for more than four decades?

Nope. The Gazette dismisses such remarks as "so much gibberish" and "an overt telegram data attempt to pander to the Cuban-American voters in southern Florida." I’m sure the political prisoners in Castro’s little island paradise will take a lot of comfort in that.



This one in the Iowa City Press-Citizen is by Carl Beyerhelm. Beyerhelm’s subject is the current Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Here is the relevant passage:

My prayer is for a just settlement of the issues that now divide them - hard ones indeed, like the re-entry of Palestinians who fled what is Israeli territory at that nation's beginning in the late 1940s. They must also settle the issue of the restoration of land to the Palestinians in the disputed areas where Israelis have established settlements and the emotional issue of Jerusalem, and which nation will control it.

Notice how Beyerhelm thinks the important issues are ones that seem to reflect poorly on Israelis. One might think that the major issue that divides them is an Arab culture that sends its children to blow themselves up to kill Israelis. But somehow that slips below Beyerhelm’s radar

Beyerhelm ends that passage by resorting to that old left-wing standby, moral equivalence:

Hard issues, all of them, and at the root of the problem is the intransigence of extreme views among both peoples.