The Man Who Smacked Down Gandhi

My morning stop at Powerline yielded two unrelated points of interest. First, Fred Thompson's rebuke (for radio: audio here) of the Gandhi-invoking peaceniks camping out in front of Pelosi's house:

During World War II, Gandhi penned an open letter to the British people, urging them to surrender to the Nazis. Later, when the extent of the holocaust was known, he criticized Jews who had tried to escape or fight for their lives as they did in Warsaw and Treblinka. “The Jews should have offered themselves to the butcher’s knife,” he said. “They should have thrown themselves into the sea from cliffs.” “Collective suicide,” he told his biographer, “would have been heroism.”

It's even better when you hear his inflection, but here's the conclusion:

The so-called peace movement certainly has the right to make Gandhi’s way their way, but their efforts to make collective suicide American foreign policy just won’t cut it in this country. When Americans think of heroism, we think of the young American soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan, risking their lives to prevent another Adolph Hitler or Saddam Hussein.

Gandhi probably wouldn't approve, but I can live with that.

Next up, a post on the contributions of Coca-Cola, or should I say Big Soda, to the developing world:

Coke has some 70 clean-water projects in 40 countries, a service it hopes will eventually boost local economies and broaden its consumer base. But the efforts are also part of a broader strategy under Chairman and Chief Executive E. Neville Isdell to build Coke's image as a local benefactor and global diplomat.
"You have to be an integral and functioning part both in perception and reality in every community in which you operate," he said in an interview.

I'm not saying all Coke does is holy, but I do contrast these efforts on their part with a recent discussion at ninme's place about the Green movement's efforts to fight global warming by refusing generators to Africa's poor. Riffing on the last part of The Great Global Warming Swindle (which you can watch at her place is you've missed it elsewhere), she writes of the injustice of denying electricity to the poor:

As for the last topic (which is about what this is doing to Africa, and the disease and mortality rates resulting from breathing wood smoke your entire short life and how a solar panel on a hospital can’t power a fridge for the vaccines at the same time as the(compact fluorescent, btw) light bulbs), it reminded me that I did some maths a couple months ago (it’s even cheaper now) and for a mere $1.50 a day we get all this (oven, hot water, lighting, computer, music and TV, the fridge), which separates us from that woman and her dirt floor...

since everyone’s always telling us how the world’s poor (those three billion people the show mentioned) live on “less than two dollars a day”, hey, they can afford that!

So all that's green isn't holy; and making green does not unholy make. Or something.