Chuckie Watch 83: Chuckie vs. the color gray

Chuckie's been thankin' about The Gray Area lately (01/10/05).  One of his readers wrote him, as Chuckie says here:

The other day I had an email, a very respectful email, from someone who was critical of some of the statements I had made in some of my soapboxes.

You mean, somebody's criticizing ole Chuckie?  Well, at least they were respectful about it.  Very respectful, even.  Anyway, this critic asked Chuckie why he seemed to be ignoring the "gray areas" in some of the issues he talks about.  This here reader seems to think that not everything can be reduced to bad and good so easily.  So, he sent this idea to Chuckie.

And Chuckie don't like it.

Now, Chuckie says he's fine with the gray in his beard and in his hair.  I'm guessing that Confederate gray is also okay with him.  But otherwise, Chuckie just don't thank very much of it:

The gray area in most instances is a dumping ground for things we either don’t want or are unwilling to face.
 
The truth is the truth is the truth and that’s the lowest common denominator for any subject.

Now this shows why Chuckie is such an insightful political philosopher.  The truth is the truth.  And that's the truth!  Now, that's insightful - and who could argue with that?  Chuckie gives us a hint there of who might: the kind of wuss who don't want to go to "the lowest common denominator for any subject."  And if the lowest common denominator is good enough for Chuckie, it should be good enough for all them wimps and wusses out there.

So, you may ask, what does Chuckie do when things look more complicated than that.  Well, he kind of, uh, goes to, you know, the lowest common denominator and, well, makes stuff up:

Did [Saddam Hussein] have weapons of mass destruction? The answer to that is also yes. We know that because he used them on the Kurds in his own country. He has either hidden them really well or sent them out of the country when he knew we were coming. My best guess is Syria.
 
So, just ignore all them fancy reports from weapons inspectors and the CIA and such that said there weren't no WMDs there.  Of course they were there!  Bush said, ah believe it, and that's all there is to it.  And the CIA and half the Bush administration is probably infilitrated by Syrian spies or something.

Moral clarity is just not a problem for ole Chuckie:

For instance is the world better off without Saddam Hussein?  The answer to that question is definitely yes.

Actually, it remains to be seen whether the world will be better off with Iraq as a staging-ground for jihadists than it was with Saddam's regime in power.  And it don't much look like the United States is safer because of the war since, you know, practically the whole world thinks we're in the wrong there.

I mean, it sorta looks that way to those of us without Chuckie's penetrating insight.  Like he shows us here:

Should we have gone to war in Iraq? That’s a decision that every American has to make for themselves. Let’s consider the alternative.
 
 Let’s say that we didn’t go to war in Iraq and Saddam managed to get just one of his poison gas weapons in the hands of a terrorist group and that group had set it off at Hollywood and Vine in Los Angeles at noon on a working day.

Since Chuckie knows better than the CIA and the Army and everybody that Iraq darn well did have that there poison gas and stuff, he knows what's what.  If we hadn't invaded Iraq, why we'd probably have some kinda A-rab terrorists settin' off poison gas bombs in Hollywood.  Actually, a suicide bomber strapped with a hefty supply of conventional explosives, or a car bomb loaded with the same, would likely do much more damage than a poison gas device set off in the open air.  You know, wind, dispersal, that kind of thing.  But Chuckie's making a subtle ethical point here.

And how did Chuckie git to this level of insight?

God left no gray areas in The Bible.

Ah mean, it's rat there in The Bible, boy!  It says rat there in the book of Ezekiel if we didn't invade Iraq then all kinds of terrorists would be trying to poison movie stars!  That's almost as certain as if George Bush himself had said it!  So why don't you wimps and wusses and unbelievers git with the program?

No, Chuckie don't like them gray areas.  It's black and white all the way for him.  Actually, given what he says in his Soapbox columns, it's pretty much all white for him.