Gorgeous George and the Case of the Stupid Senators

Here's a great blow-by-blow of Saddamite MP George Galloway's appearance in the Senate Oil-for-Food hearings this week:

For the British journalists present it was a wearily familiar experience. For years they (we) have been trying to trap Galloway; for years, the man known as the MP for “Baghdad Central” has found ways (helped by the libel laws) of slipping away just when he was thought to have been cornered.

Galloway, who has been accused of profiting from illegal commissions paid on as many as 20 million barrels of Iraqi oil, demanded his day in Washington last week after Coleman’s committee published a report showing Galloway’s name repeatedly appearing on contract agreements from the Iraqi oil ministry.

His spokesman indicated that he was coming to Washington to give the committee “both barrels — that’s guns, not oil,” and Galloway himself suggested that he was planning to take the “lickspittle” Republicans on the committee out to the woodshed there to administer a mightily merited thrashing. “You won’t want to miss this,” he promised.

Indeed we didn’t. This was vintage Galloway. Truculent, bombastic, eloquent, and willfully disingenuous. A performance of some power, hampered only by equal measures of self-importance, self-righteousness, and self-pity.

Galloway thinks himself a victim. He likes to make out that he was expelled from the Labor party for his opposition to the war (a claim repeated today, erroneously, by the New York Times and the Washington Post). In fact he was thrown out for supporting and inciting the jihadists in their work of murdering American and, in particular, British troops.

“Gorgeous George” — the nickname refers to the sharpness of his suits and the shine of his self-regard — was in his element on Tuesday, however. Nothing pleases Galloway so much as the opportunity for demagogic posing. Senator Coleman blundered in letting him appear.

Nothing was achieved at Tuesday’s hearing beyond pumping more air into Galloway’s ballooning sense of self-worth. No fresh information concerning his relationship with Saddam’s regime was revealed, no progress made in unraveling the tortuously tangled threads of the Oil-for-Food scandal.

As one friend from Scotland, and thus in the unfortunate position of being a long-time Galloway observer, lamented to me: “The guy is on his way to becoming a global celebrity thanks to the stupidity of his enemies in taking him seriously in the first place.”

Is it that he's so smart, or that our senators are so dumb?

Coleman seems a good sort, but why would you ask somebody like Galloway questions you yourself don't know the answer to?