I know what you mean about useless comparisons. I guess in this case, I was contrasting Canada’s (and Harper’s) apology to Arar with Gonzales’s slippery ‘I can’t tell you’ and ‘I can’t recall’ answers he was giving to the committee. Gonzales, like so many other Bush appointees, typifies the President’s preference of loyalty over competence or even morality.

Re. the Saddam comparison, that’s a strange one. I’ve seen the ‘If you’re against the war in Iraq, then I suppose you think that things would be better if we’d never gone and Saddam were still in power.’ line go from being a taunt, to a cliché, to almost a joke (‘where the punchline is ‘Ummm, yes?’)

When are these comparisons useful? Maybe when one of those in the comparison is not a known mass-murderer, I can’t say for sure.

At any rate, ‘Say what you will about x, he’s no y’ is just sloppy writing. I think I’ll give that clichéd construction a rest for a while.

i’ve been thinking about these types of comparisons a lot lately. we can take this further: say what you will about bush, he’s not a vicious torturer like saddam hussein. when are these comparisons useful and when are they not? sometimes they seem like sell-outs (should saddam hussein really be used as a measuring stick?) and sometimes they seem to help gain perspective.