We're still waiting for that apology to Opposition Leader Jack Layton from the Harper Conservatives.You know, the one they owe him for getting their on-line Tory Rage Machine ™ and their Tame Mainstream Media Auxiliary ™ to label him "Taliban Jack" back in 2006 when the New Democratic Party leader had the temerity to suggest that the so-called NATO coalition should open lines of communication to the Pashtun fighters labelled the Taliban by the West.
Alert readers will recall how Defence Minister Peter MacKay, at the time the minister of foreign affairs, sniped at Layton: "Is it next going to be tea with Osama Bin Laden? This cannot happen!"
The TRM, of course, went much farther, demonstrating with its "Taliban Jack" smear its unchallenged ability, as the famous advertisement on Craigslist put it, to "make up facts," and use "sarcasm and personal insults" to "score points" and "stir outrage." (Perhaps I should call this an alleged ad. Can it really be real? I mean, obviously it can, given the vicious creativity of the TRM, but one so rarely sees an admission of malfeasance so crystalline in its clarity that one has to wonder!)
We've known since last spring that the U.S. government was talking to the Taliban. However, that information has really gone mainstream in the past two weeks, with the noisy complaints from Afghanistan's Western-propped President Hamid Karzai about the Americans talking to his foes, and the apparent confirmation of the talks by retiring U.S. Defence Secretary Robert Gates in the foreign press.
It is reasonable to speculate now that the NATO-Taliban talks were meant to set the stage for U.S. President Barack Obama's declaration of victory in Afghanistan yesterday and his announcement that 10,000 American troops would be withdrawn from that country by the end of this year, with another 23,000 out by the fall of 2012.
Full Article
Source: Rabble.ca
No comments:
Post a Comment