Boston Globe Now with the Terrorists
At least in BO's world view; check out this editorial from today's Boston Globe (I'll take the basic points from it, but you should really follow the link and read it whole):

IN HIS INITIAL reaction yesterday to the London transit bombings, President Bush decried ''people killing innocent people." He said: ''The contrast couldn't be clearer between the intentions and the hearts of those of us who care deeply about human rights and human liberty and those who kill -- those who have got such evil in their heart that they will take the lives of innocent folks." [...] Bush also said the enemy will fail. ''The terrorists can kill the innocent, but they cannot stop the advance of freedom," he said. Britain's Prime Minister Tony Blair said the ''slaughter of innocent people" will fail to cower the British people, and Canada's Prime Minister Paul Martin called the attack an ''unspeakable attack on the innocent." It was all appropriate in the moment. In a greater context, there is a tragic hollowness. The world, of course, shares the sympathies of Mayor Michael Bloomberg of New York, who said the London bombings were a ''despicable, cowardly act." Yet every invoking of the innocents also reminds us of our despicable, cowardly killing of innocent Iraqi civilians. Or perhaps you forgot about them. That was by design. We have rightfully mourned the loss of nearly 3,000 people on 9/11. We have begun mourning the loss of about 40 people in London. We have mourned the loss of 1,751 US soldiers, who, bless them, were following orders of their commander in chief. But to this day, there has been no major acknowledgement, let alone apology, by Bush or Blair for the massive amounts of carnage we created in a war waged over what turned out to be a lie, the nonexistent weapons of mass destruction. [...] The propaganda of an invasion with invisible innocents surely allowed Bush to seamlessly switch his stated reason from the unique horrors of WMD to liberating an oppressed people. It is a lot easier to tell the world you are their great liberator if you do not have to own up to the thousands of dead people who will never get the chance to vote in that free election. It sounds a little bit like people who say African-Americans should be thankful for slavery because they are no longer in Africa. Worse, this denial of death, in a war that did not have to happen, is sure to fuel the very terrorism we say we will defeat. The innocents in the so-called war on terror are always ''our" citizens or the citizens of our allies. The only innocent Iraqis are those killed by ''insurgents." Our soldiers clearly did not intend to kill innocents. But this posturing of America as the great innocent, when everyone knows we kill innocents ourselves, is likely only to make us look more like the devil in the eyes of a suicide bomber.

I'm a liberal and I'm damn proud of that label and my progressive world view. Now, this will sound hollow to a wing-nut conservative, but I wholly agree with the fact that we need to do all we can to bring the terrorists (and that is indeed who they are) to bear the justice that their actions deserve. That said, we can't simply act like a Wild West posse and go around shooting up anything we want out of the need to exact punishment, any kind of punishment. Actions have consequences, even if you are (or believe you are) on the side of right.

I am adamant that our foray into Afghanistan was the right thing to do. But I'm also adamant that, as we get more and more information about how we handled its aftermath, that its prosecution and that of this whole "War on Terror™" diversion to Iraq (with tens of thousands of Iraqi dead added to the thousands of Coalition troops who have given their lives and limbs to this charade) has only caused a destabilization of global security. In my eyes, the Boston Globe is living up to the tradition of its region, calling out, questioning, and debating the hubristic hypocrisy of the ruling government, while BO and the other FoxHeads are the real enemies of the state with their calls to shut down dissent.