On Monday's Democracy Now broadcast, taxpayer-subsidized Pacifica Radio anchor Amy Goodman promoted a newspaper column in the Daily Telegraph by the mayor of London, Boris Johnson, suggesting that George W. Bush should be arrested if he lands in Great Britain on his book tour, much like former Chilean dictator Agosto Pinochet, put under house arrest in London in 1998:
It is not yet clear whether George W Bush is planning to cross the Atlantic to flog us his memoirs, but if I were his PR people I would urge caution. As book tours go, this one would be an absolute corker. It is not just that every European capital would be brought to a standstill, as book-signings turned into anti-war riots. The real trouble — from the Bush point of view — is that he might never see Texas again.
One moment he might be holding forth to a great perspiring tent at Hay-on-Wye. The next moment, click, some embarrassed member of the Welsh constabulary could walk on stage, place some handcuffs on the former leader of the Free World, and take him away to be charged. Of course, we are told this scenario is unlikely. Dubya is the former leader of a friendly power, with whom this country is determined to have good relations. But that is what torture-authorising Augusto Pinochet thought. And unlike Pinochet, Mr Bush is making no bones about what he has done.
Johnson is actually a member of the Conservative Party in England -- but in a 2008 column in the Telegraph, he endorsed Barack Obama for president, writing that Bush discredited both Western democracy and capitalism through the Iraq war and the financial crisis. The mayor sounded like Chris Matthews:
Obama deserves to win because he seems talented, compassionate, and because he offers the hope of rejuvenating the greatest country on earth in the eyes of the rest of us. All those are sufficient reasons for desiring his victory.
And then there is the final, additional reason, the glaring reason, and that is race. Huge numbers of voters, whether they admit it to themselves or not, will hesitate to choose Barack Obama for President because he is black. And then there are millions of white Americans who will undoubtedly vote Obama precisely because he is black, and because he stands for the change and the progress they want to see in their society.
After centuries of friction, prejudice, tension, hatred - you name it, they've had it - America is teetering on the brink of a triumph. If Obama wins, then the United States will have at last come a huge and maybe decisive step closer to achieving the dream of Martin Luther King, of a land where people are judged not on the colour of their skin but by the content of their character.
So this is Pacifica Radio in a nutshell: George W. Bush should be arrested and jailed. But leftist cop-killer Mumia Abu-Jamal should be hailed as a hero on his birthday. Radical leftists live in a convoluted moral universe. But conservatives shouldn't have to pay for their radio shows.
