COUNTERCOLUMN: All Your Bias Are Belong to Us

Link here. Scroll down to the comments section. Snippets follow; I edited heavily for brevity. TallDave appears in the comments section on this blog from time to time.

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Pandagonite mds: I try to reserve a lot of my swearing for the realization that we've spent American and Iraqi lives to establish an Iran-friendly nation built on Islamic law, where women will be less free than when we started this war...under deliberately false pretenses.

Commenter TallDave: uh, rape rooms? Udai? remember that? criticizing the regime meaning rape/torture/death?...

Pandagonite Annejumps: ALL the women in Iraq did not go to the rape rooms.

Pandagonite Annejumps: ALL the women in Iraq ARE going to have fewer rights under the fundamentalist government.

Pandagonite Stavro: People who Saddam perceived as working against his regime received this kind of treatment and fate. But that is a very small percentage of the population. The sweeping laws defined in the likely new "constitution" will relegate the rights of Iraqi women to a far more Iranian, third class status, while Saddam's regime (peculiarly) rigorously enforced gender equality in universities and employment, evil as he was. If the comparison is between these two situations, the latter is definitely a worse one for women, if only because it affects the entire female population.

The usual right-wing tactic of throwing up "rape rooms!!!" etc. in the face of criticism about just what the FUCK we're "creating" there (as in the Islamic Republic of Iraq) lost its value months ago.

Commenter TallDave: I wonder if the 2 million people Saddam killed are able to "walk the streets." Oh wait -- they're dead. I guess not. Meanwhile, Iraqis now have the freedom to elect their leaders, they have free speech, a free press, a constitution to be freely voted on.

Abu Ghraib was an aberration, an the authors of that relatively minor abuse were punished. To equate those incidents with Saddam's state-santioned rape/murder/torture centers betrays a profoundly ignorant lack of perspective...

Pandagonite Linnett: Free speech, unless you say something "unIslamic" or "antiAmerican," in which case either the insurgents or the US troops will kill you. The "freedom" to elect their leaders--leaders who will either be powerless or, if they carry through their agenda, more tyrannical than Saddam.

TallDave: The protestations over Islamic law are ridiculous. We're talking about civil family law -- how much people get in divorce court. Not honor killings, not whether women can vote, not whether women have to wear buhrkas -- just finance and family law. And here we have people saying "well, it was better with no right to vote, no right to free speech, and rape rooms." Unbelievable.

Iraqi women can vote now. Ultimately, if they don't like the law -- hey, they're 50% of the electorate. They can get the law changed.

Pandagonites: Ask Riverbend.

TallDave: Riverbend? You may as well ask Eva Braun what she thought of the Nazis.

Stavro [on the number of people Saddam killed]: *Sigh* That "2 million" figure is a bit exaggerated. Several hundred thousand to be sure, though. [It's not exaggerated at all. It simply includes the dead from the war Saddam started with Iran.]

Pandagonite Tom: let's see some facts on the Iraqi Constitution. You're the one making claims that the women can change it.

TallDave: Simple. They can vote. Next.

Tom: They could vote under Saddam, as well.

Stavro: You voted for a mass murderer.

Stavro: The government will likely be rolled over when we leave. The best estimates of the size of the insurgency amount to 50,000-100,000 people.

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You get the idea. If I were the DNC chief, I'd think about paying these morons just to shut up and stop embarrassing the Party.

Splash, out

Jason