Matthew Yglesias has used the North Korean prison sentences of Laura Ling and Euna Lee to make a political attack on the policies of the George W. Bush administration. Yglesias' post is "Hard Labor in North Korea." After a long discussion of forced labor in totalitarian societies, Yglesias concludes with this:
I don't have much to add.As in the Soviet Union during the high tide of the Gulag, it appears that the forced labor camps are important to the regime not just as a mechanism of repression ....
Needless to say, it’s easy to recognize this sort of barbarism as the torture that it is when you read about it being done by North Korea (it appears that the Bush administration and the DPRK were both modeling themselves on the Chinese Communist tactics from the Korean War). And it is being done, and on a massive scale. Meanwhile, a related angle to this is that many of the people in the prison camps are people who actually escaped from North Korea and then wound up getting apprehended in China and deported back. In terms of practical things that could be done to help the population of North Korea, getting the Chinese to stop doing this.
If radical leftists today really think the Bush administration's detention policies - which were the product of a national, bipartisan, and democratic consensus on the clear and present dangers following 9/11 - are coequal to the policies of not only Kim Jong Il, but to Joseph Stalin's Gulag Archipeligo, than we really have reached the Rubicon of partisan polarization in American politics today.
Words. Utterly. Fail.
Matthew Yglesias is just a sick, awful man.
My thoughts and prayers go out the families of Laura Ling and Euna Lee. And I'm praying for their safe return home.
There's more commentary at Memeorandum. Senator Jim DeMint's statement on North Korean terrorism, at Red State, is also worth a look.
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Added: It's not just Yglesias. Check out Spencer Ackerman as well, "What Laura Ling And Euna Lee Will Endure."
10 comments:
One of the challenges we face as a nation is that our so-called "intellectual class" is now increasingly the product of an insular, biased education system. Simply put, lefties like Yglesias don't know history, and particularly the real history of totalitarianism and communism -- the tremendous purges of Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot and others in the name of ideology. Because they don't understand the true evils committed by truly evil regimes, they are unable to make any real distinctions when it comes to looking at our actions in the post 9/11 world. You can talk all you want about the vast array of rules in place to protect the rights of detainees, but all the left sees is Abu Graib -- as if the abuse there was Bush administration policy! And this is the same relativism that sees Palestinian suicide bombers against civilians as the same as targeted IDF attacks against Hamas military installations (hidden in schools). It's absolutely nuts.
Donald -- the left lives in a totally upside down world. You do an admirable job in high lighting the moral (and logical) bankruptcy of their arguments -- but it is a frustrating endeavor, to say the least!
I may be mistaken, but didn't those two reporters work for the Current network channel? Isn't that the marxist channel on Dish Network?
Just noting some irony...
No article on this subject is complete without reference to the fact that Misses Lee and Ling were sent to North Korea by Al Gore's Current TV. I expect that real, professional journalists will sometimes have to hazard a hazardous country, but a former Vice President of the United States, who thought he was great enough to lead this country -- and we thank God that he was defeated in 2000! -- ought to know better than to hand Kim Jong Il two bargaining chips! [Shamelkess blog plug alert!]
I think this speaks more to the failures of the supposedly stellar diplomatic abilities of the One than to anything done by the Bush administration.
After all, according to the reality-challenged left, Barrack Hussein Obama supposedly brought with him supernatural negotiating powers.
Some god Obama is turning out to be, as he seems utterly incapable of changing the behavior of certain "leaders" on this planet who, according to his disciples, were going to be falling prostrate at his feet.
As for Yglesias, he needs to contact whatever educational institution he attended and seek an immediate refund.
Assuming, of course, that we taxpayers aren't on the hook for his formal indoctrination.
-Dave
Well said, Kenneth and Donald. I would say the left wants to rewrite re-write history but they don’t pay enough attention to history to bother. To compare Bush to the Chinese and Koreans horrors is ludicrous in the, but plays to the weakness of the media-educated segment of our population that will believe such fabrications. The Chinese and North Koreans have consistently utilized horrific torture, brutal re-education camps, murdering millions. The lists of needless murders of Mao (70 million), Stalin (35 million), Hitler (7 million Jews alone), Khmer Rouge, 2 million in the space of one year, may be a portent of things to come!
In the leftist zeal to forget anything associated with the past administration they have lost sight of root causes of our current crises, the effective measures taken, and subsequent successes of the previous administration. Future historians will correct this. There were many terrorists caught, that were not tortured; Iraq invaded, regime change, elections, and stabilization; in some cases there were, according to the CIA, successful uses of torture –only two in Gitmo-when necessary; and in Afghanistan and Pakistan we’re seeing incremental progress in spite of inaction from Obama.
These types of media-biased journalists are in league with the many entrenched college professors and effete academics that perpetuate the leftist sense of guilt, shame and rage on Republicans-Americans. They are deluding their audience with false claims for domestic economic recovery by unprecedented spending, and indulging in exaggerated hopes against an impossible enemy that is everywhere and yet no where.
Therefore, without real leadership we are going to risk, an otherwise avoidable, two-front war. The current Administration’s lack of severe response to Middle East and North Korean threats is beginning to make Obama appear bound by his own (and by association, our) Gordian Knot while disarming himself and us of any method of escape. Post-WWII there were just the two superpowers that envisioned a world that would embrace its respective ideologies. Of course, the world became a theater for a struggle between these two superpowers, namely, the Cold War. We are now faced with the specter of a hot war over differing ideologies with heads of state that are fully capable of unleashing nuclear weapons to prove an ideological point. We Americans can be complaisant and lulled by our good fortune into thinking nothing bad will happen to us. But, Obama’s sunshine-and-hope popularity will be a fleeting thing with no inherent value in itself without solutions. We need severe pre-emptive measures in order to deal with this new nihilistic set of global enemies.
This is merely a spin piece to answer Rachel Maddows evisceration of Obama's emergency "speak before Cheney does" speech at the National Archives a couple weeks ago.
Rachel points out that Obama's "Indefinite Detention" policy under his new "legal regime" is much worse than GWB's.
The libtards "forgot" that detail.
The detainess in Gitmo are being held under Geneva Convention rulews even though they do not qualify under Articles 3 or 4 and certainly not article 5. They can legally be shot for spies seeing they were caught on the battlefields making war as civilians.
If this was WWII, no one would ever know what happened to them.
I'll volunteer for that duty.
Yglesias represents what Kenneth G. Davenport sums up well in his drubbing of the "intellectual class," formerly called the intelligentsia before that got eliminated by Yglesias allies like Joe Stalin & Mao & Pol Pot et al...
These JournoList cabal boys simply are undereducated except in the arts of disinformation & conveying leftist propaganda. They have no sense of values outside their narrow slice of the political spectrum which is infrared on the European red for left, blue for right color scale [or ultraviolet on the US inverted scale, which happened with the connivance of the Rather/Jennings/Brokaw troika of leftist droogs in the network nineties before cable squashed the nets.]
The left simply allows murderous socialists like Mugabe, Castro, Kim Jung Il, [formerly] Saddam, and Chavez to run free and clear of any moral scrutiny by the "gatekeepers" who micromanage the American political elites. The JournoList cabal hates Israel because of the Likud & likes Iran & Syria because of the statist controls these ruthless anti-democracies maintain over their populations.
It's what these Fifth Column types would like to do to American capitalism---destroy it by a thousand cuts.
Any comparison between Abu Gharaib and the slaughter by famine of two million Koreans while Billy Jeff Clinton flirted with NorKs using Madeleine Albright's twaddle---that is as delusional as Jimmy Carter's 1994 free-lance diplomacy with the NorKs which forced Billy Jeff to strike a horrible bargain.
And James Earl Carter defines the outer limits of delusion---though Yglesias & his JournoList crew are inching toward that precipice.
Amb. Bolton once again predicted that this is what would happen.
And I suggest we send Fat Al Gore whose network foolishly sent the two women to NorK over to negotiate. Fat Al could use several years of manual labor to work off his own enormous delusions.
It's the Third World Thug mentality and Obama has it down pat and counts on his Obamedia that has orgasms every time the fool opens his yapper.
I get what Matt is saying.
A third world Stalinist dictatorship that jails journalists is EXACTLY like a democratic nation jailing mass murdering terrorists.
Makes total sense. Give him a medal.
*sigh*
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