Laban Tall has a confusing post about Robert Fisk. Or at least, I’m confused by it: I assume he means it to sound perjorative, but it actually comes across as complimentary.

He quotes Mr Fisk at his mother’s funeral: "But I also remember, at the service in the chancel of the little stone Kentish church, that I angrily suggested that if President Bill Clinton had spent as much money on research into Parkinson’s disease as he had just spent in firing cruise missiles into Afghanistan at Osama bin Laden (and it must have been the first time Bin Laden’s name was uttered in the precincts of the Church of England) then my mother would not have been in the wooden box beside me."

Says Laban, "That little anecdote says more about Robert Fisk than all of his Indie pieces put together."

I’d agree. To me, it says that he understands that disease kills far more people, in far more horrible ways, than wankers like Bin Laden. It says that he isn’t blinded by the War on Terror lunacy which claims that a few thousand crazy Islamists are the only threat worth bothering with. It says that he picks butter over guns – and it’s hard to see how that isn’t the best choice.

And I’m aware that Mr Fisk isn’t the most scrupulous journalist, and I don’t read his budget newspaper. In this context, that doesn’t matter in the slightest. He *gets it*.

(and yes, that was a deliberate attempt to regain the maturity high ground from the neocons and their fellow overgrown kids playing at being soldiers, who think that ‘getting it’ means ‘thinking we should bomb more Muslims’).