George Galloway and Syria

George Galloway, whose Respect party is dropping gay rights from its platform, has decided Bashar al-Assad is one of the world's great leaders. In a speech at Damascus University, where according to lectures my advisor has given to undergraduates you can't give a talk that has the word "politics" in the title, he praised Syria's freedom, and proclaimed it a bastion of resistance to American aggression.

Look, I've been to Syria. Bashar may not be his father, but Abraham Lincoln he ain't. If we want to come up with some rigor to Galloway's worldview, then it is simply that the U.S. and U.K. represent the core evil in the world today, and therefore anyone who resists those two powers is good. Or we could just speculate without evidence that there's some profit in all this for him, as has been alleged with regard to Iraq and Pakistan.