Fact-Checking the "PRT Boondoggle" Blog
A project of the PRT NewsCenter

Wednesday, April 18, 2007

See him try to blog about another complex issue

It's always been my position that the U.S. Greens are flawed. They adopt extreme positions and stick to them with a no-compromise tenacity similar to that which the neocons hew to theirs. Often to my sensibility the Greens sound naive, which somewhat reflects the party's relative newness. No doubt my background in public policy has me lean toward neutral analysis and consensus-building, and away from the Right-Wrong formula that politics needs to follow. However, that doesn't mean the Greens deserve to be smeared by the Minnesota anti-PRT propagandist --

Zimmermann Supporters Try to Shame Congressman Keith Ellison
Watch the second half of this You Tube video as Charley [sic] Underwood and Dave Bicking, two of Gary Dean Zimmermann's most ardent supporters and apologists make complete fools of themselves at at a meeting in Powderhorn Park, April 15, 2007:



Source

The core of the position voiced by Underwood and Bicking is if you're against the war you should stop funding it. Yes, it's simple and yes, it ignores that there is a civil war, the result of the Resmuglicans' gross miscalculations. One can't help feel the whole U.S. bears moral responsibility and we shouldn't abruptly withdraw from a disastrous situation.

However, there's nothing in Underwood and Bicking's position that would rule out unilateral withdrawal being followed by deployment of U.N. peacekeepers, and the U.S. making financial restitution to Iraq via some neutral organization or country.

Did Underwood and Bicking try to "shame" Rep. Ellison? All they really did was articulately state their positions and challenge Ellison to match them. For his part, Ellison stated a very mainstream anti-Administration position.

Did they "make complete fools of themselves"? Hardly. Listen to the audience in the video: Underwood got APPLAUSE (@3:53 to go).

And it sounded as though Dave Bicking scored a point when he asked about redeployment -- Ellison voted for the surge, which includes Afghanistan too, is he against that part of the war? Ellison replied Yes, but said he didn't want to get locked into anything. That's not the sort of equivocation I would want myself saying archived on YouTube, although I do understand what he means and I'm not going to blame him for it. But I get what Bicking means too.

While I personally like to balance all the issues, Bicking, Underwood and many Americans (maybe even a majority) have made the war their single #1 issue. And it is stupid to attack Bicking, Underwood -- and by extension their position on Iraq -- just because of Zimmermann and PRT. One would think the anti-PRT propagandist would be able to identify with single issue voters, since he is one himself (1, 2, 3)

Iraq and Afghanistan are complex issues that are confounding people a lot smarter than the Minnesota anti-PRT propagandist. But why is he trying to blog about this issue anyway? Probably all he cares about is how al-Maliki, al-Sadr and Karzai stand on PRT.



gPRT

P.S. - again with the ego: Labridor is not mentioned in the video, yet once again he tags the post with his own name.
When a marsupial gives birth, the Ken Avidor crawls into the mother's pouch to complete development

No comments: