"and all that stuff"

Politics Those of us who've been online for a long time know that the web exists as a kind of massive digital "dance to the music of time" in which long lost acquaintances or names from the past crop up now and then. Charles Johnson's one of those.  A right wing so-called war blogger, he was the kind of writer I used to loath (and still do), a cheerleader for the Bush administration, his acolytes pitching up on discussion boards peddling jingoistic nonsense.

I've been purposefully ignoring his blog for so long I hadn't noticed he'd had a bit of a political reversal, a sea-change so profound that this key paragraph from an Alter-net interview simply doesn't sound like the same fellow:

"I was totally wrong about Barack Obama. That’s one of my main regrets at this point. I really fell for a lot of the right wing propaganda, and I thought he was going to be a communist and a radical leftist and all that stuff. I believed a lot of the propaganda about him. If I could go back I would vote for him now, but we don’t have that time machine yet. That’s actually one of the main things. I should not have been so ready to accept it. That was one of the things that really woke me up, seeing the truth as opposed to all the lies that were being spread by this blizzard of propaganda."

As we head off into another six months of a US presidential campaign which is going to be filled with just this kind of depressingly mendacious propaganda, we can now at least take comfort that rational thoughts will always win out.  Eventually.