Everything Seemingly Is Spinning Out of Control

The following is an excerpt from OpinionJournal.com’s “Best of the Web” written by the editor, James Taranto.

‘It’s His Fault for Inventing the Light Bulb!’
“Prolonged Outage Generates Rage Toward Edison”–headline, Los Angeles Times, Dec. 7

Everything Seemingly Is Spinning Out of Control
“Some Children’s Cereals Packed With Sugar, Study Finds”–headline, Washington Post, Dec. 7

Still Crazy After All These Years
Syria’s dictator, Bashar al-Assad, “has denied ordering his troops to kill peaceful demonstrators, telling the U.S. television channel ABC that only a ‘crazy’ leader kills his own people,” Reuters reports:

Assad is under growing international pressure, including a threat of sanctions from the Arab League, over a crackdown on nationwide anti-government protests in which the United Nations says more than 4,000 people have been killed.

“We don’t kill our people. . . . No government in the world kills its people, unless it’s led by a crazy person,” ABC’s website on Wednesday quoted Assad as saying in a recorded interview.

“Most of the people that have been killed are supporters of the government, not the vice versa,” Assad said.

This statement is even stranger when you look at it closely. What he seems to be saying in that last paragraph is that the regime isn’t putting up much of a fight–that opponents are killing supporters in massive numbers.

Now of course his statement that only a government led by a “crazy” ruler would kill “its own people” is true, if you understand the latter term to mean supporters rather than countrymen. Stalin was evil, not crazy; he just didn’t consider the Ukrainian Kulaks to be “his people.”

Assad’s statement is obviously false, but it is also contradictory. His claim is that his regime is allowing its opponents to kill its supporters. That’s similar enough to the regime killing its own people that Assad would be crazy by his own definition were he telling the truth.

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