Let me put myself on the record right now: I can't stand George Galloway as a person or as a politician. In my opinion he has always been a sleazebag, a demagogue and one of the oldtime crew of cronyist politicians who felt that somehow his nation and it's people owed them a living and a comfortable one at that. In that much, he must have felt right at home in the Senate with others of his kind from both Left and Right.
He certainly left them with no doubt of his own version of the story and left the senator in charge sputtering slightly incoherently about his lying under oath before finally admitting "I don't know".
"I have met Saddam Hussein exactly the same number of times as Donald Rumsfeld met him. The difference is that Donald Rumsfeld met him to sell him guns and to give him maps the better to target those guns."
That said, what is the brouhaha all about? Does anyone who isn't trying to score political points or distract the people from more important matters really care?
It all started with allegations, via the Telegraph and the Christian Science Monitor, that Galloway had personally received $600,000 a year in oil-for-food money from Saddam - all told, it was alleged, about $10,000,000.
Then Galloway won libel actions in the British courts against both newspapers - the allegations were untrue. And let me tell you, on my reading of George, if he had received that kind of moolah he would now be sunning himself on some Carribean island, not fighting a general election as an independent candidate.
Now, the only allegation that seems to stick - the one a Democrat challenged him on, and the only one that Galloway has any real difficulty in defending himself on - is that a friend of his made $900,000 in donations to a charity run by Galloway and the money may have come from oil-for-food corruption. Notice no-one is saying that Galloway personally profited from this. No-one.
Good, says I - what better way to wash that money clean of the nasty way it was made than to have it spent in a good cause?
What's the big deal about these donations to a charity? Can someone explain? If a rapist's money ended up being donated to an anti-rape charity, would they give it back or call it poetic justice? The whole thing smells like scapegoat smoke-and-mirrors to me - and I am one who would love to see Galloway get brought down a peg or two.
UPDATE Wednesday 18th
The Independent has a very good analysis of George's foreign adventure. As usual, read it before it disappears behind the firewall.
The newspaper notes that "while the committee admitted it had no physical proof that Mr Galloway had "cashed" the allocations, it said the implications were clear."
Galloway responded:
"You have nothing on me, Senator, except my name on lists of names from Iraq, many of which have been drawn up after the installation of your puppet government in Iraq," he said. "What counts is not the names on the paper. What counts is where's the money, senator? Who paid me money, senator? Who paid me hundreds of thousands of dollars? The answer to that is nobody and if you had anybody who paid me a penny you would have produced them here today."
He has a point there.
As I said, smoke and mirrors. This is the last I will post on the subject unless it turns into real news. I would rather focus on something important, like the Downing Street Memo.
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