Teaching Remedial Decency (Maureen Dowd)

Before the war, America railed against the Iraqi leader for slaughtering innocent Iraqis. Now the Iraqi leader is railing against America for slaughtering innocent Iraqis.

Iraq is blustering about sending away American troops to make life better for Iraqis, after American troops were sent in to make life better for Iraqis.

With fury swirling over the Haditha massacre and the shooting on Wednesday of two women, one of whom might have been pregnant and on the way to a hospital, Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki laced into the American military, accusing it of regular attacks on civilians that were "completely unacceptable" and pledging his own inquiry on Haditha.

"They crush them with their vehicles and kill them just on suspicion," he said, adding that some in the military "do not respect the Iraqi people," and that assaults on unarmed civilians will help determine how long American troops are welcome in Iraq.

Bold talk from a tenuous government dependent on U.S. forces to prop it up during a sectarian bloodfest.

More: http://select.nytimes.com/2006/06/03/opinion/03dowd.html?ex=1149480000&en=1d5420a2da5ee8b1&ei=5087%0A

Dowd did everything in her power in 2000 to kill Gore's chances and get the Chimp elected. Now that she sees what she helped bring about she's writing remedial pieces critical of Busholini. Too little, too late.

I don't understand why so many otherwise-reasonable people seem to love Dowd. She was a prime-time character assassin during the 2000 election

There's no way to teach someone not to shoot an unarmed woman or child. If somebody doesn't already know why they shouldn't murder a baby, it's not clear that a refresher course will help.

The problem with brushing up on core values is that if you don't know them by a certain point you can't learn them. You can't teach remedial decency, any more than you can teach remedial ethics to White House officials who vindictively leak information about critics of the war after vowing not to leak.