Compare, Contrast

May, 2005: Chris Dykstra, in New Patriot, on Norm Coleman's investigation of the Oil For Food scandal:

British legislator George Galloway ran Norm Coleman around in circles Thursday. Gallowway spared no one, especially are very own Normy, who could only muster a squirmy smile in the face of such a barrage. At least someone put the lie to Coleman's stupid posturing. Coleman obviously picked on the wrong guy to shore up his transparent attempt to advance his career by pounding the UN-is-a-bogeyman drum. A Galloway sampling:

"I met Saddam Hussein exactly the same number of times as Donald Rumsfeld met him," Mr Galloway went on. "The difference is that Donald Rumsfeld met him to sell him guns, and to give him maps the better to target those guns.

Now, I know that standards have slipped over the last few years in Washington, but for a lawyer, you're remarkably cavalier with any idea of justice.

"I gave my heart and soul to stop you committing the disaster that you did commit in invading Iraq. Senator, in everything I said about Iraq, I turned out to be right and you turned out to be wrong.

In the attendant comment thread:

ME: "No offense, but I have to ask: Did you watch/read the actual questioning from Coleman and Levin? I mean, *any* of it? Or did you just get the rundown from Kos?"

DYKSTRA: "Mitch - did you watch any of it? or just get the rundown on FR? Because I don't know how you can watch it, read about it or read the transcript and draw a different conclusion. "

Cuz I iz just a dum wingnut, I gues.

Or...not?

Christopher Hitchens, naturally, delivers the news with a rhetorical kick to Galloway's tender bits:

1) Between 1999 and 2003, Galloway personally solicited and received eight oil "allocations" totaling 23 million barrels, which went either to him or to a politicized "charity" of his named the Mariam Appeal.

2) In connection with just one of these allocations, Galloway's wife, Amineh Abu-Zayyad, received about $150,000 directly.

3) A minimum of $446,000 was directed to the Mariam Appeal, which campaigned against the very sanctions from which it was secretly benefiting.

4) Through the connections established by the Galloway and "Mariam" allocations, the Saddam Hussein regime was enabled to reap $1,642,000 in kickbacks or "surcharge" payments.

Here's the whole thing, in convenient PDF format!

Hitch, with emphasis added by me:

The evidence presented suggests that he lied in court when he sued the Daily Telegraph in London over similar allegations (and collected money for that, too). It suggests that he lied to the Senate under oath. And it suggests that he made a deceptive statement in the register of interests held by members of the British House of Commons. All in all, a bad week for him, especially coming as it does on the heels of the U.N. report on the murder of Rafik Hariri, which appears to pin the convict's badge on senior members of the Assad despotism in Damascus, Galloway's default patron after he lost his main ally in Baghdad.

In closing:

Yet this is the man who received wall-to-wall good press for insulting the Senate subcommittee in May, and who was later the subject of a fawning puff piece in the New York Times, and who was lionized by the anti-war movement when he came on a mendacious and demagogic tour of the country last month. I wonder if any of those who furnished him a platform will now have the grace to admit that they were hosting a man who is not just a pimp for fascism but one of its prostitutes as well.

Good question.

Mr. Dykstra?

Galloway was"running circles" around Norm Coleman during last May's hearings; he was pulling out all the rope Norm was giving him.

(By the way - has anyone gotten a recording of that stupid stoopid Wendy Wilde song, to the tune of "Mr. Postman", about the whole Coleman/Galloway thing? The one where she scolds Coleman for persecuting the poor benighted Galloway? Because that could become a real collector's item, if ya know what I mean).

Posted by Mitch at October 26, 2005 12:14 PM | TrackBack