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May 25, 2005
OP/ED Round up
That most venerable and intellectual of conservatives, William F. Buckley Jr., asks WHY STOP -- ANYWHERE? Buckley is the only living conservative intellectual that I can honestly say that I respect. Not because he's the only conservative intellectual - there are others with clearly keen minds. No, I respect and admire Buckley because his first allegience is to logic and intellectual honesty rather than to ideology. And he brings that very allegiance to logic and intellectual honesty to this opinion piece.
Buckley openly asks, why all the fuss over embryonic stem cell research? In the process he eloquently and almost obliquely exposes the illogic and hypocrisy of President Bush's "existing is okay, new is immoral" position on stem cell research. It's a great read!
Ted Rall discusses America's Terrorist Ally, Uzbekistan.
Rall begins with a side-by-side comparison of Uzbekistan's dictator Islam Karimov and Saddam Hussein.
Who is more brutal, Saddam Hussein or Islam Karimov? Reasonable victims disagree. Saddam's goons electrocuted his political dissidents. Karimov, on the other hand, loots so much of his country's oil wealth that his state torturers don't have an electrical grid to draw upon. So his police torturers are forced to resort to medieval methods. They boil their "terrorist extremists"--businessmen who refuse to pay bribes--to death.
Stephen Schwartz and William Kristol of The Weekly Standard offer their own take with Our Uzbek Problem where they try to blame it all on Putin while framing the problem as one for the entire country rather than as the direct result of President Bush's deliberate choice to turn a blind eye to yet another tyrant. As if we collectively chose to work with a brutal dictator...
And The Nation's Ari Berman gets his ducks all in a row and explains why Newsweek Was Right. As much as Bush et al would like for the American public to believe that Newsweek was the only one to stick their neck out and make the Koran desecrating charge, the fact of the matter is that many others have made that very charge. And Berman provides a slew of links to back it up.
Posted by Kevin at May 25, 2005 12:44 PM