Posted 2:16 PM by Floyd

California senator Dianne Feinstein wrote an editorial for Sunday's San Jose Mercury News called "How to repair Iraq and U.S. reputation". When I first saw the headline on Sunday, I assumed that it contained the usual nonsense, and gave it a pass. (The headline has enough nasty moral equivalence to keep me seething for an hour. Imagine: Iraq needs to have its reputation repaired because it oppressed and murdered its citizens, it invaded its neighbors and waged chemical warfare against them, and it refused to validate that it would not develop weapons of mass destruction. And the US needs to have its reputation repaired because it solved all those problems, but did not adhere to Robert's Rules of Order.)

Today I read a letter in the San Jose Mercury News criticizing Feinstein's article, which contained this phrase: "Feinstein cites the refusal of the administration to sign the Kyoto Treaty, the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty, and the International Criminal Court as examples of unilateralism." I found this hard to believe -- did Feinstein really say that? Yes she did:

With the refusal to sign the Kyoto Treaty on global warming, the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty and the International Criminal Court -- to name but three examples -- the attitude has been one of unilateralism: that the United States knows better than the rest of the world.

Now I am used to the idea that my senior senator is a poisonous fascist hypocrite, but I had not thought of her as a dumb poisonous fascist hypocrite. Yet the evidence is there in black and white. Kyoto was killed by the Senate while Feinstein was in office, and the vote was 95-0. I don't need to dig through voting records to know that Feinstein either participated in unilateral behavior, or stood by and did nothing about it.