The Ranks of the Repentants Grow

So Bjorn Staerk joins the Coalition of the Repentants.

This is an honest self-appraisal by a former war supporter who admits he was wrong. I have very mixed feelings.

I am trying to think where I might have been if I had only read mainstream media. If I didn't have an instinctual distaste for and disbelief of pundits and politicians I caught in lies and those who were making quasi-racist arguments against the Arabs.

You only had to see the record of Cheney and Rumsfeld and the neocons that were appointed to important foreign policy posts and how they had constantly exaggerated past threats. Distrusting them and seeking alternate sources for the "facts" they were putting out to drum up support for a war they had wanted for years was the only responsible course.

After years of watching otherwise smart people defend the indefensible it is good to see some looking back over their mistakes.

Will Staerk still give weight to the future opinions of those who were consistently and repeatedly wrong that he had once praised? Will he give more weight to the ones that were denigrated and turned out to be repeatedly correct? Will he tell the ghost of Molly Ivins, "You were absolutely right and I was a dumb smuck?"

At least Staerk is honestly repentent and starts with where he might have gone wrong was heeding the anti-Islam, anti-Arab claptrap that passed for intellectual thought on the right. He is now worried that he has been promoting a cause that seems more like xenophobia than rationalism. To me it was obvious this is where the pro-war Right was headed from the beginning.

After beating myself against closed minds for four years I am sorry my reaction is primarily "its about f*cking time."

Tags: xenophobia, fascism, the right, Molly Ivins, Bjorn Staerk