I wish all Republicans could be this honest.

John Hinderaker* is an influential right-wing blogger who is a lawyer and writes for Time magazine's "Blog of the Year" and a dozen different right-wing journals. He isn't beating around the bush or sucking up to the MSM. He's coming right out and saying what he believes in, regardless of the consequences. To hell with political correctness!

Of course, what he believes in is colonialism, in this case, but...

Well hey, why not? Iraq was fucked up under the Baath party, so we might as well invade them, dismantle their government, stick around indefinitely but at the very least as long as it takes us to build our permanent bases, and hope they pick up the habits of modern democracy by osmosis or something, right? It's bound to work, because colonial adventures always help the natives, right?

In fact, Hinderaker is being a lot bolder than most of his representatives in government, by coming right out and saying this. They would never in my lifetime** use the word "colonialism" except to ridicule people throwing around accusations of it. Good thing the right wing has Hinderaker and friends advocating it!

Hinderaker is saying he agrees wholeheartedly with some guy who thinks that "Had Britain had the courage to face down Gandhi and his rabble a few years longer, the tragedy that was the partititon [sic] of India might have been avoided." Let's dissect this. (To the extent that I'm able. Robert Farley might have a better command of history than me.) In order to believe that, you have to believe that if you and yours did something with any good effects at all, it should be praised and encouraged. Never mind ways you might improve on it, or ways to avoid its bad effects, or the spirit it was done in. Let alone whether or not its good effects outweigh its bad. You also have to assume that the victims of colonialism (sorry, the "subjects") could not have made improvements in their society on their own. Considering that there's a pretty good counterexample of that in Japan and how it modernized***, I can only think of two explanations for that attitude - elitism or racism. "White man's burden," in other words.

I've always felt a little bit guilty about my "Republicans for Voldemort" t-shirt. Considering how polarized and debased politics are these days, should I really wear a blanket ad hominem attack against the opposite party on my chest? But sometimes it seems entirely accurate. Forget about humanitarian work that happens to be motivated partly by self-interest, or de facto colonialism, or temporary and UN-guided colonialism - one of the leading thinkers of the so-called neoconservatives supports actual colonialism.

Fuck it. I'll get rid of my t-shirt when Ailes, Bush, Cheney, DeLay, Dobson, Frist, Hinderaker, Limbaugh and Randall Terry get treated like the selfish, deceitful and/or malicious assholes they are, instead of like leaders of the nation.

Via Lawyers, Guns and Money, in turn via Sadly, No!

* His real name, I swear.

** Downgraded from the traditional "never in a million years."

*** I'm not endorsing Pearl Harbor or their own colonialism in China and Korea, obviously, but they modernized very well with little outside help.