Taste Of Your Own Medicine

It's amazing how crazy these right-wingers get when forced to defend their own beliefs. Case in point: the Instapundit.

It's finally happened.

The mainstream media finally sees Putz for what he is: not a moderate, reasonable "non-partisan" -- but a hard-right extremist. Columnist Paul Campos not only takes Putz to task for his assassination fantasies, he does so by equating him Ward Churchill -- exactly the right analogy.

See, Reynolds claimed that we should be quietly killing Iranian atomic scientists, as if that's possible. And now Paul Campos calls him on it.

Murder is the premeditated unlawful killing of a human being. Glenn Reynolds, the well-known University of Tennessee law professor who authors one of the Internet's most popular blogs, recently advocated the murder of Iranian scientists and clerics.

Of course Iran is not at war with America, but just as Reynolds spent years repeating Bush administration propaganda about Iraq's nonexistent weapons of mass destruction, he's now dutifully repeating the administration's claims about supposed Iranian government involvement in Iraq's civil war.

Moreover, even if Iran were at war with the United States, the intentional killing of civilian noncombatants is a war crime, as that term is defined by international treaties America has signed. Furthermore, government-sponsored assassinations of the sort Reynolds is advocating are expressly and unambiguously prohibited by the laws of the United States.

Instapundit's amazing first reply is that Iran in fact HAS been at war with the US since taking hostages in 1979. Scott Lemieux gets this exactly right:

My question: when does he start calling for Michael Ledeen to be put on trial for high treason for helping to sell arms to a country the U.S. is at war with?

Ledeen and half the Reagan Administration, you mean.

Insty's second reply was printed today in the Rocky Mountain News, and Blue Texan does a nice job of eviscerating it.

Your false dilmmea! ("I'm just sayin'--isn't it really more reasonable to kill a few scientists and mullahs than nuke the whole country?"):

Campos chose to devote an entire column (“The right’s Ward Churchill,” Feb. 20) to a blog entry of mine from last week, in which I wondered why the Bush administration wasn’t acting covertly to kill radical mullahs and atomic scientists, rather than preparing a major attack on Iran. (Silly me, I thought this was advocating a less warlike approach).

Your apples-to-oranges comparison! ("Heads of state and terrorists" = "scientists and religious leaders"):

History first: There’s nothing beyond the pale about suggesting assassination and covert action as an alternative to warfare. In 1998, Sens. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., and Joseph Biden, D-Del., asked the government to look into assassination as a means of dealing with terrorists; Sen. Chuck Robb, D-Va., suggested assassinating Saddam Hussein the same year. On Jan. 3, 2001, Rep. Bob Barr, R-Ga., introduced legislation to facilitate the assassination of terrorists.

And finally, your bogus WWII analogy! ("Just look at what we did to those Nazis when our nation was at war with them!"):

“Similarly, the September 1944 Allied bombing raids on the German rocket sites at Peenemunde regarded the death of scientists involved in research and development of that facility to have been as important as destruction of the missiles themselves. Attack of these individuals would not constitute assassination.”

This might be the first time Reynolds has been called out as a violent extremist. It's something he employs on a regular basis, and he can't take being on the other side. Especially when it was done in such a fact-based way. We've had a similar imbroglio with Mark Steyn, who said this...

Why did Bosnia collapse into the worst slaughter in Europe since World War Two? In the thirty years before the meltdown, Bosnian Serbs had declined from 43 percent to 31 percent of the population, while Bosnian Muslims had increased from 26 percent to 44 percent. In a democratic age, you can't buck demography -- except through civil war. The Serbs figured that out -- as other Continentals will in the years ahead: if you can't outbreed the enemy, cull 'em. The problem that Europe faces is that Bosnia's demographic profile is now the model for the entire continent.

And then tried to backtrack and say he wasn't ENDORSING ethnic cleansing there, just predicting it as an outcome. Charming man. Humorously, one person that leapt to Steyn's defense was Instapundit himself, who has said in the past that genocide is "unavoidable."

It's amusing to see these people try to run away from their own words. They've been tarring their enemies with the foulest rhetoric for years, even decades, and now it's coming back to haunt them.