Thursday, August 26, 2004

Nuance

John Kerry says he can’t be blamed for voting to give authority to George Bush to wage war to liberate Iraq because how was he to know that Bush would take that authority and “use it in the wrong way”? He seems to think he can be absolved of the consequences of any action he takes if he didn’t predict those consequences in detail. In other words, he claims to have intended that Bush would not have used Congressional authority to go to war but would have, for example, NOT gone to war!

Isn’t Kerry responsible for the consequences of his votes in Congress? Isn’t he responsible for making the judgment that Bush would properly and responsibly (in Kerry's view) use authority granted him? How stupid does Kerry think people are? Or, perhaps more to the point, how stupid is Kerry?

Here at the end of August, the Kerry campaign doesn't seem to have any traction at all. I will be very surprised if he manages to gain any voters out of the Republican convention. If form holds, Bush will gain. He may gain big. And if by the middle of September Bush is ahead by five points or more in most polls, Kerry is an ex-politician. He has gone to join the choir invisible of politicians who never quite made it onto the big stage, like his former boss Dukakis, Mondale, Gore, Dole and his special buddy, Captain Oldsmobile. ( I just saw somewhere that nickname for Teddy Kennedy, and I love it!)

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Tuesday, August 24, 2004

Gambella Massacre

It's amazing what you find just by ambling around the blogosphere. Actually, I found this site while I was looking at Africapundit. The Anuak blog tells a detailed story of the Ethiopian government's ethnic cleansing of an area of western Ethiopia called Gambella state. Here is a
map.
I have never heard about this. I followed the Ethiopia-Tigre-Eritrea story for years, mostly, I guess, because it corroborated my idea that collectivism always leads to violence. The stories on Anuak Genocide Watch are as bad as what came out of Rwanda, much worse than Bosnia and Kosovo. Because Gambella has no oil (that I know of) or uranium and doesn't fit any pet victim profile that would galvanize the UN into action (hah!), it has been totally ignored. It makes one wonder how many of these stories exist around the world, holocausts that fade unnoticed into history. Their motto is not "Never again". It's "That never happened". People care more about the elephant or the mountain gorilla than they do about Anuaks. The tragedy can be best appreciated by seeing where the survivors headed for refuge: Sudan!

Update: there is, apparently, an oil angle, though this article is irrationally biased against oil extraction. I understand the mistrust of government, but there's no reason why oil can't be produced to the profit of the Anuak. It will only be the fault of the left-leaning government if it isn't. To call the use of valuable resources "socially and environmentally destructive" tells you everything you need to know about the real agenda of "Genocide Watch" and their "Cultural Survival" project to keep people as pets, protected from the nasty twenty-first century so they can stay poor on their farms and never get it together to defend themselves from the Ethiopian government. I'm only linking to these collectivist fools because there's some interesting history in their article.