Fareed Zakaria, host of his own foreign affairs show on CNN, used the CNN.com website to post a puffy interview with himself entitled, "U.S. should react to Libya's actions, not its words."
Asked about Moammar Gadhafi's public embrace of Abdelbasit al-Megrahi, the convicted Lockerbie bomber--the man who killed 270 people back in 1988 and yet was inexplicably released by the Scottish government and then greeted as a hero by Gadhafi and everyone else in Libya--Zakaria said blandly that this was a "miscalculation" on the part of Gadhafi & Co. By such amoral reckoning, any kind of crime, even mass murder, or the lionization of mass murder, can be dismissed as a mere "miscalculation."
Zakaria instead chose to emphasize the supposed sophistication of Libyan leaders--Gadhafi's sons, who also also hailed the release of al-Megrahi:
Gadhafi has two sons -- both Western-educated, fluent in English, quite modern -- who perhaps want to see Libya integrated more into the global community, getting more foreign investment, and as a result are trying to chart a path back for a country that got into a self-imposed exile and cut itself off from the modern world for four decades.
Continuing, Zakaria said:
This is different from the revolutionary Gadhafi of the 1970s.
Yeah sure. All we know is that Gadhafi hugged a mass-murderer, and then delivered a nutty rant to the UN General Assembly, which proved how little sorry he is for what al-Megrahi did 21 years ago.
The quid pro quo between Zakaria and Gadhafi is clear. Zakaria pulled his punches on Gadhafi, and so got his interview with Gadhafi yesterday.
As they say, the real scandal isn't what's illegal, the real scandal is what's legal.
I hope Zakaria can sleep at night.
