Exaggerating the deeds of a crooked politician

Snickers Man

On Last night's Questions and Answers on RTE, the program began with everybody ganging up on the Sunday Tribune editor for her paper's reports, now retracted, which speculated that Liam Lawlor had been travelling with a prostitute when he died.

Quite right. Nobody condones those hasty reports. Even the NUJ has criticised them. And the papers involved have apologised and admitted they were wrong.

By a supreme irony, later on in the same programme, Minister Brian Cowan said in a discussion on Iraq that Saddam Hussein had 'killed 2 million of his own people.'

Oh Yeah?

The nearest estimate I have been able to find of deaths attributed to Saddam's Regime is 600,000. That is admittedly monstrous, but if it's wrong to exaggerate the deeds of one corrupt liar and crook surely it's wrong to make exaggerated claims about the misdeeds of another?

Evil of this kind is not linear. It doesn't make Saddam twice or three times as bad if he killed 2m as opposed to a 'mere' 600,000. But at the same time, Cowan is a member of a government that has involved this country in military action against the wishes of its population and contrary to our traditional non aligned stance.

If it's OK for him to say 'Saddam was a bastard who imprisoned people without trial, slaughtered Kurdish and Shia civilians and caused two wars with his neighbours, so I can add another 1.4m deaths to his rap sheet without feeling guilty' then it should be fine for the papers to say: 'Look, Lawlor was a barefaced liar, a corrupt politician and a crook who went to jail three times. So we made up the bit about him dying in the company of a teenage hooker. So what?'

Mr Cowan should apologise. The Sindo and Tribune did.

marco murphy

Good post.
Liam lawlor was just as bad as ANY of those in government.
No difference, he was a human, and the media really blew it up, as per usual.

Snickers Man

Snickers Man wrote:

Mr Cowan should apologise. The Sindo and Tribune did.

I heard some Jewish professor describe the death of 10 million Jews at the hands of Hitler. By your logic he should humbly apologise to the neo facist groups for tacking on a couple of million.

The Sindo did not exaggerate Lawlor's rap sheet, they invented something new altogether. The corect analogy would be that if they said he took 2 million in corrupt payments, and say he 'only' took €600k. I would suggest that no apology would be needed in that instance. Or, on the other hand, if Cowan said Saddam was a paedophile, that would be wrong and would merit an apology, because it's a completely different offence than those usually levelled against him.

Furthermore, as for your figure of 600,000, I would have thought the Iran Iraq war alone would have seen that figure exceeded as estimates of total deaths range from one to one and a half million. Whether he was responsible for it is another matter of course, but I presume he was as responsible as Bush is for the deaths of Amrican soldiers out there now.

Snickers Man

Deleted User wrote:

I heard some Jewish professor describe the death of 10 million Jews at the hands of Hitler. By your logic he should humbly apologise to the neo facist groups for tacking on a couple of million.

He should apologise to his coreligionists whose history he has debased by means of falsehood. Once you get into the realms of misrepresenting thefacts, you tarnish the credibility of what really happened. At school, we were always told that the Protestant settlers in Ireland exaggerated the atrocities of the catholic insurgents in 1641. They certainly did, but massacres did take place, and the exaggerated stories of them were used as justification by Oliver Cromell 8 years later when he did a spot of massacring of his own and called it 'a righteous judgement of God on these barbarous wretches'

conor74 wrote:

The Sindo did not exaggerate Lawlor's rap sheet, they invented something new altogether. The corect analogy would be that if they said he took 2 million in corrupt payments, and say he 'only' took €600k. I would suggest that no apology would be needed in that instance.

Comment is free, facts are sacred.

Furthermore, as for your figure of 600,000, I would have thought the Iran Iraq war alone would have seen that figure exceeded as estimates of total deaths range from one to one and a half million.

What Cowan says is '..Saddam Hussein killing 2 million of his own people'
(my emphasis) You can listen to it on the link I gave you if you like. It's in the question about Iraq and it's less than a minute from the end of that section so you can scroll to it quickly.