Lack of Progress

[billroper]

The thing that saddens me most about the election tomorrow is that I see people -- who I like -- posting things that are patently untrue, things that are echoes of things that were said about a person that I suspect that they revere, the late President Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Certainly there were many people who felt that he would do anything to get us into World War II, up to and including lying about foreknowledge of the Pearl Harbor attack.

And despite anything bad that the current President may have done, nothing that he has done quite compares to herding the entire population of American citizens of Japanese descent in the Western United States into detainment camps. Yeah, I know we'd all agree now that what he did then was a pretty bad thing, but some things are easier to figure out from a distance than they are at the time that you're doing them.

And who could argue with the idea that the right thing to do was to go to war to remove a crazed dictator who was murdering tens of thousands of his own citizens? The biggest question, I suspect, in either case ought to be, "What took you so long to save us?", a question that we might well be correctly putting to the United Nations on the subject of Darfur.

Governments are made up of imperfect men and they will make mistakes.

So will the rest of us.

And maybe some time in the next 75 years, we'll figure out how to do it better. God knows, we haven't figured it out yet.

Comments

[billroper]

I agree that posting those documents was a dumb thing to do. From what I understand, someone was supposed to review the documents before they were posted and remove anything of that nature. Obviously, they didn't.

[minnehaha.livejournal.com]

It was back during the we'll-show-you-they-had-WMD phase of the war. Basically, the idea was that if the administration put everything up on the web, the right wing bloggers would comb through it and find evidence. Absolutely nutty thing to do -- and I thought so back then -- but that was before the redefinition of the war's purpose and the Administration was kind of desperate.

This is the best commentary on the issue I've read.

B