you don’t know where your interest lies

At first, I was tempted to blame Walter Williams for the nightmarish headlie slapped over the Amarillo Globe-Republican reprint of his latest column. I assumed the words of the headlie (“Real torture is listening to leftist abuse claims”) must appear somewhere in that column.

But they don’t.

There’s a lot of bad reasoning, faulty analogies, and typical right-wing obfuscation in his column, but at least Williams doesn’t compare fellow citizens who speak out and express opinions to torturers.

That comparison was left for the AG-R headlie-writer to make.

At one point, Williams invokes the tired Republican line that any comparison of present or future events to Nazi atrocities belittles the Holocaust. Anytime we say “we don’t want to behave as Stalin or Pol Pot would have” we’re somehow disrespecting the victims of those dictators.

It’s an odd line of reasoning, but we hear it all the time now from politically correct Republican opinion-makers. And if it were true, wouldn’t it also demean victims of torture to equate their sufferings with listening to a fellow citizen speak his mind?

Are AG-R headlie writers allowed to read columns before they slap headlies on them?

SPACEDARK