Crocodile Tears

I'm getting really sick of this. InstaPundit just put up yet another in his endless series of posts, to the effect of "It was OK for Bush to lie about Saddam's Weapons of Mass Destruction because we needed an excuse to invade Iraq because Saddam is Not A Nice Man".

No.

Right wingers don't care squat about Human Rights. Never have, don't now. All you ever hear from the right of center is the occasional mild disapproval of Castro or Palestinian suicide bombers. Never a peep about China. Mention Guatemala and they look at you like you're crazy. Mention what the Israelis are doing to the Palestinians and you'll get an explanation of Why They Deserve It. Burma? A bit disturbing, but no worse. Zimbabwe? You can get some heat here, because a lot of the violence is black-on-white –- maximum scare factor for right wingers. Only in the furthest-out fringe of the nut groups do you see explicit calls for "recolonilaization" of "countries incapable of self-rule". (This is what we would need to do if we put in an explicit policy of Fixing Everything around the world.) Tut-tutting doesn't count for anything.

The only time a right winger will ever even mention human rights is when denouncing a country/dictator who is already on the shit list. Iraq is the current obvious example; Cuba and Nicaragua were others.

Hell, right wingers don't care about human rights in this country. After all, they're only immigrants or blacks or people in prison -- not like anybody we know. Nobody who matters, certainly.

Yo! Right Wingers! Listen up! During the whole runup to the invasion of Iraq, every anti-war blogger had to start every post with a disclaimer, to the effect that, yes, Saddam is Not A Nice Man. It's turnabout time. From now on, every time you say "It was OK because Saddam was Not Nice", I want to see a similar disclaimer on why you don't want to see an invasion of Burma, Uzbekistan, Belarus, or any of the other human-rights pestholes around the world. You might also throw in an explanation about why it's OK to do business with China -- after all, it's a Communist country with a government that killed probably more people than any other government in history.

Every time, remember. And with at least as much heat as you use in denouncing France.

As an aside, I'm really surprised to see this attitude from Insty. He is, after all, a law professor. I'm sure he would be the first one up in arms if the Government put in a policy of convicting Bad Guys on faked evidence.