Those eccentrics at the Women's Peace Conference in Dallas did not disappoint. From today's Dallas Morning News:
Nobel Peace Prize winner Betty Williams came from Ireland to Texas to declare that President Bush should be impeached.In a keynote speech at the International Women's Peace Conference on Wednesday night, Ms. Williams told a crowd of about 1,000 that the Bush administration has been treacherous and wrong and acted unconstitutionally.
"Right now, I could kill George Bush," she said at the Adam's Mark Hotel and Conference Center in Dallas. "No, I don't mean that. How could you nonviolently kill somebody? I would love to be able to do that."
About half the crowd gave her a standing ovation after she called for Mr. Bush's removal from power.
The story goes on to say that one of the conference organizers quickly distanced Williams's views from the conference's, but I don't think she can get off the hook so easily. In 2006, Williams told a group of Aussie schoolchildren that she wanted to kill Bush. Her outrageous views were well known, and she still got invited to this peace shindig. I guarantee you that any goodwill by word and example these peaceniks hoped to inspire in the community here is now gone.
UPDATE: As a (liberal) colleague of mine said this afternoon, it's bad enough to give voice to one's longings to assassinate a US president at a peace conference, but to do so in Dallas, at a hotel just blocks away from where JFK was murdered, really takes the cake.
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From Tom Lehrer's "National Brotherhood Week:"
"Oh, the Protestants hate the Catholics,
And the Catholics hate the Protestants,
And the Hindus hate the Moslems,
And everybody hates the Jews.
But during National Brotherhood Week, National Brotherhood Week,
It's National Everyone-smile-at-one-another-hood Week.
Be nice to people who
Are inferior to you.
It's only for a week, so have no fear.
Be grateful that it doesn't last all year!"
If you want to see the whole "That Was the Year That Was" songbook,
http://www.casualhacker.net/tom.lehrer/the_year.html
In my opinion, among the funniest political satire ever.
Which is worse? An Irishwomen making a rhetorical gaffe, or professional journalists using their paper to plead incessantly for war on behalf of a lying, incompetent administration?
Rod has publicly admitted he was wrong, so it's unfair to include him in this number. Your larger point, however, is well made. When it's possibly hundreds of thousands of innocent Muslims on the rhetorical chopping block, that's okay. One rich white man, though, that's unconscionable.
Yay America!!
"When it's possibly hundreds of thousands of innocent Muslims on the rhetorical chopping block, that's okay. One rich white man, though, that's unconscionable."
But to be fair, Rod and others were not calling for the deaths of "hundreds of thousands of innocent Muslims;" they were calling for the overthrow of Saddam Hussein. No one who ever was or currently is in favor of the war was in on it to kill innocents, particularly since at the time, the war was expected to be much easier than it has truly been.
God bless.
"But to be fair, Rod and others were not calling for the deaths of "hundreds of thousands of innocent Muslims;" they were calling for the overthrow of Saddam Hussein."
Anyone who calls for the overthrow of a soveriegn nation must surely know that innocent lives will be lost.
Spot on, Bill. It is extreme nonsense to say that advocating war is not the same thing as advocating the death of innocents. That is what war is: killing enough of the enemy to induce them to surrender.
A pro-war position is a pro-death-to-innocents position.
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