Charlie (CO): yeah, ethically is what I meant. And I do know people who have given low grades for opinions that differ from the prof. I find that disgusting.

Why not? It happened to me.

I know, you mean “I can’t ethically flunk her for her opinions….”

Oh! There is just SO much, So wrong, with that statement. Oh! Oh, oh, oh !!! I can barely STAND that horrid bunch over there. When will they die?

I am unqualified to comment on the Christianity angle of Bush’s “God bless his soul” comment I did hear of the comment a couple days ago and found it, ummm…., meaningful in its minimalism. Any POTUS would have had to say something and what Bush said was… appropriate.

I also had this vision of this and this on loop for a while.

What do you say about such an evil vile man on his death?

He certainly wasn’t going to praise Arafat.

And he has to maintain some positive relationship with who ever succeeds Arafat, so cutting the man down wouldn’t do. And it’s not a very Christian thing either, bad mouthing the dead.

The old man was right once again.

God Bless John Howard, however. The man has some serious cajones. I have to say, when considering our allies, I would much rather have one Tony Blair and John Howard then a 100 Jaques Chirac and Gerhard Schroeders.

Arafat represents an abyssal descent that was furthered – via an ideologically induced blindness in some ways reminiscent of Western post-Tet propaganda – by the Left and the Western MSM. (His ascendancy dovetails rather well with the advent of the New Left and that’s no mere coincidence). How many decades will it take, even projecting some best case scenarios, to reverse the inter-generational malignancies and detritus he has left in his wake?

(And yes, the overall situation is more complex than that, but contrast Arafat with an MLK, a Gandhi, those who led the fight against the slave trade, etc., and Arafat doesn’t merely come off as a conspicuously bad second, he comes off as a wastreling malevolence who has engendered and fostered his nihilistic ethos into successive generations and generations yet to come. The Left and the MSM love to play the Palestinians off against Israel, but rarely do they play them off against other Arab states who commonly treat them as virtual untouchables – that is especially true vis-a-vis Jordan and Egypt, but holds true for other Arab states as well. That’s why other states in the region are so often willing to continue to treat them as political pawns, but not as equals within their own societies.)