We’re Gaga for Galloway

Norm Coleman is an idiot.

Not an ideological idiot, not a partisan idiot, but a plain old-fashioned, drool-on-his-tie idiot.

The Minnesota Republican senator who took Paul Wellstone’s seat after one of the most disreputable campaigns in American political history, has been trying over the past year to make a name for himself by blowing the controversy surrounding the United Nations Oil-for-Food program into something more than the chronicle of corporate abuse that it is. The U.S. media, which thrives on official soundbites, was more than willing to lend credence to Coleman’s overblown claims about wrongdoing in the UN program set up in 1996 to permit Iraq — which was then under strict international sanctions — to buy food, medicine and humanitarian supplies with the revenues from regulated oil sales. Even as Coleman’s claims became more and more fantastic, he faced few challenges from the cowering Democrats in Congress.

But when Coleman started slandering foreign politicians he exposed the dramatic vulnerability of his claims that the supposed scandal was something more than a blatant example of U.S. corporations taking advantage of their powerful connections in Washington to undermine official U.S. policy, harm the national interest and profit off the suffering of the poor.

The Senate investigation that Coleman sought regarding the Oil-for-Food program has already revealed that the Bush administration failed to crack down on widespread abuse of the oil-for-food program by U.S. energy companies, and that U.S. oil purchases accounted for the majority of the kickbacks paid to Saddam Hussein’s regime in return for sales of impensive oil. Indeed, the report concludes, “The United States (government) was not only aware of Iraqi oil sales which violated UN sanctions and provided the bulk of the illicit money Saddam Hussein obtained from circumventing UN sanctions. On occasion, the United States actually facilitated the illicit oil sales.”

Instead of forcing the president, his aides and the executives of Bayoil, the Texas oil company that the report shows paid “at least $37 million in illegal surcharges to the Hussein regime” — money that helped the Iraqi dictator solidify his grip on power — Coleman started to make wild charges about European officials such as British parliamentarian George Galloway.

Galloway called Coleman’s bluff and flew to Washington for a remarkable appearance before the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations. “I am determined now that I am here, to be not the accused but the accuser,” Coleman announced as he stood outside the Capitol Tuesday. “These people are involved in the mother of all smoke screens.”

The member of parliament tore through Coleman’s flimsy “evidence,” issuing an unequivocal denial that began, “Mr Chairman, I am not now, nor have I ever been an oil trader and neither has anyone been on my behalf. I have never seen a barrel of oil, owned one, bought one, sold one, and neither has anybody on my behalf.” He accused Coleman of being “remarkably cavalier with any idea of justice” and pointed out error after error in the report the senator had brandished against him.