Whack! Pow! Zam! Tim Dunlop Rocks!

This post right here from Tim Dunlop at The Road To Surfdom says everything that has long been needed to be said about the Bush-loving, right-wing warbloggers:

You gave up any right to claim solidarity with the Iraqi people when you excused at every opportunity their abuse and torture in the prisons of Abu Ghraib. When that story broke, it wasn't the side of the Iraqi's you took, it was the side of the Bush administration, and you mouthed all their pathetic rationalisations from "a few bad apples" to "not as bad as Saddam." When the Iraqi people demanded action, you joined the likes of Alberto Gonzales and argued that the international sanctions against such treatment didn't apply to the Iraqis in Abu Ghraib, that such measures were quaint and obsolete.

You gave up any right to claim solidarity with the Iraqi people when you refused to acknowledge how many people had been killed in this little adventure by attacking every legitimate attempt to put a number on the deaths. It wasn't the methodology of a survey like the Lancet study that caused you concern; it was the very existence of such a study that caused you all to freak out. So you sought to smear and downplay the result instead of trying to understand it or perhaps even insist that the administration make an effort itself to count the casualties.

In other words, your concern then, like now, was domestic politics not Iraqi lives. All you had was denigration for anything that didn't comply with your fantasy picture of post-invasion Iraq.

You gave up any right to claim solidarity with the Iraqi people when you joined those like Donald Rumsfeld who denied the very existence an insurgency, when you mocked people for being concerned about the post-invasion looting, and when you insisted that all this fighting stuff and other bad news coming out of Iraq was just a ploy by the liberal media to mislead the world.

Again, you had a choice between the reality in Iraq that ordinary Iraqis were facing or the spin the administration applied to that reality and at every turn you chose the spin.

And what about your so-called concern about democratic government and the rule of law that allows you to claim the election as a personal victory? Well, you've shown your true colours on that score too.

You gave up any right to gloat about democracy when you refused to hold the administration accountable for the bogus rationale it used to launch the invasion in the first place. You showed your true colours when for month after month you kept up the pretence that WMD were bound to be found any day now. You showed your true colours when you repeated every lie and exaggeration the administration made in trying to connect Saddam Hussein with Osama bin Laden and/or the attacks of 9/11.

Having failed every test of democratic citizenship at home you now claim to be champions of democracy abroad. It is to laugh.

In other words, your concern was not about democratic governance and transparent deliberation but about partisan advantage. Each time you were given the choice of accepting the administration's claims or challenging them and demanding answers you chose passive acceptance, weaselly rationalisation or silence.

And the rule of law?

You showed your true colours about your commitment to the rule of law when you excused and cheered on all attempts by the Bush administration to lock up without charge or trial anybody they deemed to be a "terrorist". Instead of arguing about the sanctity of the US constitution and the norms of western democratic legal practice, you were willing to suspend each and every protection rather than speak out against your side of the political aisle.

What a record: at every step along the way when you have had to choose either between solidarity with the Iraqi people, dedication to the basic premises of democratic government, support for the rule of law or siding with the Bush administration come what may, you have assumed the role of partisan apologist on every count.

For the first time in a long time, I'm almost proud to be a fellow Australian.