This picture was discussed on Bill Maher's show. Yeah, I watch that show sometimes because I enjoy my blood pressure going up. Supposed conservative pundit Andrew Sullivan opined that by sitting with women in burkas and talking about breast cancer, Laura Bush was completely missing the point. He compared this action to sitting with slaves in the antebellum South and talking about how they suffer from sickle cell anemia.
Anyway, retired General and former Democratic presidential candidate Wesley Clark then made the jaw-dropping that Sullivan was wrong to criticize the wearing of Burkas. He said that it's wrong to pass judgment on the culture of others, stating that the women in the picture might prefer/want to wear the Burkas (!). He pressed Sulllivan on whether he's ever talked to a woman in a Burka (missing the point that the women wouldn't be allowed to talk to Sullivan and that, since Sullivan is gay, it probably wouldn't be a very good idea for him to set foot in a fundamentalist Islamic country).
Apparently, Clark doesn't understand that in most societies where women wear Burkas they have NO CHOICE but to wear them. His comments mirrored some comments from liberals under my earlier post about this picture. I guess some on the left have decided to completely sacrifice women's rights at the altar of "multicultural respect." In other words, some on the left have decided it's so bad to pass judgment on anyone's way of life (unless they are Christian conservatives) that enslaving women is something we're not supposed to condemn anymore.
Would Wesley Clark have refused to condemn slavery because it's wrong to condemn another society's mores/traditions? Some liberals amaze me. They will condemn George Bush and Dick Cheney but can't bring themselves to criticize totalitarian, fundamentalist, anti-gay, anti-women regimes that won't let women even show their faces.
After that, the typical liberal bromides erupted on the show, namely: It's terrible that Bush has developed a politics of fear (so apparently we shouldn't fear Al-Qaida or Iran getting nukes); it's wrong to label Iran's Republican Guard a terrorist entity (so to heck with the fact there's evidence they're killing American soldiers; since we hate Bush we'll oppose everything he does); and America's now a terrible place to live because Bush has destroyed our civil liberties (would someone please give me ONE example of an average Joe whose civil liberties were destroyed because Bush is wiretapping terrorists?)
