I just had to...

...go over to Scott Erb's blog to see how he would turn the hose on the Iraqi elections, but he hasn't said a thing about them so far. Instead, I found this (see the January 28, 2005 entry). The first paragraph notes that his class had watched The Killing Fields and read the book First They Killed My Father, both about the genocide committed by the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia.

At first I was shocked. Here was notorious Marxist apologist Erb introducing his students to mass murder by Communists. What was wrong here? Nothing, it turns out. All had been rectified by the middle of the paragraph:

The role of the US troubles them, most never realized that the US invaded Cambodia, or flew over 3000 bombing missions. This was before the Khmer Rouge came to power, but those actions helped generate antipathy to the US and the corrupt pro-American Lon Nol government, thereby allowing the Khmer Rouge to draw more recruits and become powerful enough to take over the country.

And that was but the sixth sentence in the paragraph. The bad Americans, you see, were the true cause of the Khmer Rouge's genocide. It was the American attempt to fight the murderous Vietnamese Communists that brought the murderous Cambodian Communists to power, not just because the Americans tried to get after the North Vietnamese units taking refuge in Cambodia, but because the Americans supported the "corrupt pro-American Lon Nol government."

In Scott's world Communists get off easy. It's the corrupt "thugs" supported by the U.S. who are always left holding the guilt, right after America itself. How, exactly, does someone dare to draw an equivalency between a "corrupt" government and a genocidal Communist regime?

Through the magic of a tenured position on the faculty of an American university, I believe.