Eric Margolis: "Bush's Mussolini-like strutting"

[Minstrel Boy]

Another column of Bush-burning hellfire from The Toronto Sun's Eric Margolis Sept 28. Hot stuff.

Excerpts:

I was no Clinton fan, but give me his iffy morals any day over Bush's Mussolini-like strutting. Sen. Edward Kennedy is absolutely correct when he calls Bush's Iraq war a "fraud" concocted to win the next elections.

...

Last week, Bush received a glacial and scornful reception at the United Nations that symbolized the world's contempt and disgust for his administration. Not since Nikita Khrushchev pounded his shoe on the speaker's rostrum has a major leader so embarrassed himself and his nation before the world body.

...

The White House's mouthpiece media, led by Fox News, have simply blanked out world opinion and endlessly chorused administration war propaganda.

...

Citizens of the old Soviet Union suffered the same information isolation. Like Americans since 9/11, they were force-fed agitprop and patriotic pap disguised as news, and deprived of all knowledge of the real world around them.

http://torontosun.com/Columnists/margolis_sep28.html

[AP]

1. His book War at the Top of the World is very useful for understanding

south asian geo-politics.

[EFF BrandyWine]

2. This is an interesting article.

Damn! I knew that strut reminded me of someone. Right! Benito the old fascist himself. Used to stick out his chin in an arrogant pose too. Of course we all know what happened to Mussolini....

[Cha]

3. Wow! And this I know is coming from a republican!

"The White House was left choking on its own grotesque lies"

It was Not a pretzel.

[SeveneightyWhoa]

4. That's funny..

My city's version of The Sun, the Edmonton Sun, didn't include this in the paper today. How very conservative of them. They usually print Margolis' columns, but there are a few that they don't--apparently this one would be too critical for my city's mostly-conservative audience!

[Minstrel Boy]

5. That Margolis still has a column in the Sun

is a happy surprise. (FYI to non-Canadians, The Toronto Sun and other Sun papers are conservative tabloids.) Like many other watchful moderates, the transparent gangsterism of Bush has, to a certain extent, radicalised him.

[SeveneightyWhoa]

7. You're lucky you live in T.O.

At least you've got a nice liberal population over there--where I'm at, the almost neo-conservative editor seems to be cutting Margolis' truth-filled columns out of the paper as often as he can. Its pretty rare to see a Bush fan in Canada nowadays--unfortunately about a third of them are located right in the Sun's editorial boardrooms!

..and the far-right slant isn't even the worst part of the paper. The fact that 80% of the paper is composed of ads is sickening!

[_Jumper_]

8. What about the Toronto Star?

Is that a liberal newspaper?

[JohnyCanuck]

11. Pretty well

It's the paper Canadian winger types love to hate.

[_Jumper_]

12. Cool

I read it online.

[Aidoneus]

9. he still hates leftists as much as Mussolini did

That he's talking like us about Bush lately hasn't changed that core of him.. I don't think it has, anyway..easy enough to check, write him and strike up a conversation on Pinochet or corporate "globalization". That he's got it right about Iraq/etc does not necessarily mean he's come to his senses about the mechanism behind these things. He writes some very, very good work on other subjects, though, and he's not on board with this phony "war on terra"/global Muslimeenhass like other ex-Cold War cheerleaders are..
I like a lot of his work, reading him is a bit night & day for me sometimes. :)

[JohnyCanuck]

13. At the time of the last G7 conference in Italy

Margolis was pissing and moaning in his column that the reason the anti-globalization demonstrations at these events were likely to get out of hand was because Italian and European cops were a bunch of sissies and didn't know how to deal with the anti-globalization demonstrators appropriately. In his column he suggested they needed to use the methods employed by the "Turkish Military Police" when dealing with demonstrators.

[Aidoneus]

14. the strangest line I've seen him write on the subject

(a bit OT but I've been dying to see this explained somehow)

--snip--

What the indulgent press calls `anti-globalism activists' is a core of extreme Marxists, anarchists, and street thugs, around which gravitates a nebulous galaxy of grubby students; assorted leftists; union militants; advocacy groups; and what my sharp-tongued mother calls `scum of the gutter.'

The next G-8 conference is to be held close to my Alberta home in Kananaskis, one of the world's most heavenly locales. This is a terrible mistake. Hold the next G-8 powwow on a cruise ship. Or in Ankara, Turkey. Turkey's feared paramilitary police would just love to have a go at the professional rioters who have intimidated Europe's gentler gendarmes. Or hold the meeting in Paris, where France's ferocious CRS riot police (known in French as `the crushers') would make paté of the Marxist storm troopers.

And storm troopers is what they are. The professional, full-time street Marxists - mainly Germans - who have turned harmless G-8 photo ops into war zones are no different from the Communist toughs who battled Hitler's Brown Shirts in Berlijn in the 1920's. Any `demonstrators' who show up equipped with helmets, masks, body armor, and iron bars should be arrested at sight and jailed for long terms. Looters and arsonists should be shot.

--snip--

http://www.bigeye.com/072901.htm

I get that he really, really hates the 'anti-globalization' protestors, but with that bolded line is he defending Hitler's Brownshirts and the elite class interests behind them, or backhandedly endorsing at random the people he spends the rest of the piece virulently attacking? In some cases I'd say that's particularly an astute comparison (a bit overblown, but a fair enough reference), but I know he's making it for the wrong reasons..

[alfredo]

6. Kick

and a Canadian Kick

[Spazito]

10. Another kick, well worth reading

:kick: