Anti-Climacus

MY GOODNESS: Norm is really on a roll in this interview. Begin with the part that starts "Second, the plain horror of what happened, squashed in between the 'yes' and the 'but' and then lined up in a long list of other horrors, was diminished," and continue through the end of that question.

Okay, I can't resist: here's an especially good bit:

"For the rest, the clear tendency of the proffered contextualization and these convenient shifts was to set up a rough moral equivalence between the US government and those it was – actually – at war with. We were supposed to think that George W. Bush and what he represented, on one side, were on a level with Bin Laden, al-Qaida, the Taliban and what they represented, on the other. But to propose even a rough equivalence here is to overlook or make light of the circumstance that George Bush – despised as may be, and all observations or jokes about Florida notwithstanding – is an elected politician in a democracy, with everything that this entails. He is answerable before a democratic electorate, and constrained by a legal and political culture and institutions which, whatever their limits, are as good, broadly speaking, in the way of democracy as humankind has succeeded in establishing so far. This culture and these institutions are the indispensable historical and ethical starting point for any left-wing or other genuinely progressive opposition to existing relations of oppression, exploitation, injustice."