I've really been trying to stay away from the recent contretemps surrounding the visit of the odious Mahmoud Ahmedinejad to New York, especially the silly Kabuki theater that was presented at Columbia University, the once proud home of such intellectual giants as Jacques Barzun and Lionel Trilling, now reduced to a geopolitical version of the Jerry Springer show.
Given everything that the Iranian government has done - the hostage crisis, bankrolling Hezbollah, threatening to wipe Israel from the face of the earth - it is amazing that anyone could, with a straight face, support the regime. But sure enough, people do. I've been doing a little jousting on the subject over at "The Big Question" again and I have learned remarkable things. Apparently, based on the earnest pleadings of the bien pensants over there, Iran has been undergoing a regular Prague Spring and that free speech is in flower, including protests against the malodorous Ahmedinejad. Why, if we would simply leave the Iranians alone, there would be the flowering of freedom there. Really, it's true.
Because I've been, shall we say, a smidge skeptical of some of these claims, I've been labeled "deliberately obtuse." Now that's a badge of honor - I sincerely hope that I'm never able to make enough distinctions that I would be willing to somehow excuse a government that routinely terrorizes its people and whose titlular head claims, with a straight face (pun intended), that there are no homosexuals in Iran.
I don't remember who said it, it may have been Orwell, but the quote that comes to mind is this - there are some ideas that are so stupid that only an intellectual could believe them.
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