Galloway reactions
Scott has enough internal fortitude to have been able to liveblog the hearing yesterday. Scott’s earned my admiration, since I wouldn’t be able to bear listening to Galloway for more than 5 minutes, much less make cogent, insighful analysis of it all. This morning Scott has a few final thoughts, and manages to catch Galloway in a lie or two.

Derbyshire was amused. Jonah Goldberg opines,

One hopes that such a performance puts a bit more zeal into the efforts of the Congressional investigators to nail Galloway — assuming he’s guilty, as I do. Though it’s entirely possible he was Saddam’s lickspittle on principle

On other news, Alan Freeman, an economist in Greater London Authority Economics, launches UK’s Venezuela Information Centre.

Update Claudia Rosset:

But to focus on Mr. Galloway misses the real story, which resides not in his theatrics but in those stacks of oil-for-food documents that Congress has been steadily bringing to light. Mr. Coleman’s subcommittee is one of a number of investigations that have been piecing together the jigsaw of suspect deals with which Saddam exploited oil for food to thwart sanctions, buy arms, fund terror, and seek political influence around the globe. As a private financial investigator, John Fawcett, testified before another hearing, held Monday by the House Committee on Energy and Commerce, it was an immensely corrupt program, run by the United Nations between 1996 and 2003, which was a critical era during which the rules of the post-Soviet new world order were being written. The result, said Mr. Fawcett, was that oil for food “gave a tremendous boost towards the institutionalization of corruption within the global economy, the repercussions of which have barely begun to emerge.”

Oil-For-Food is “the mother of all smoke screens”, not the investigation, as Galloway claims.

Update 2 The Scotsman (via Hispalibertas) sums it all in one headline: Galloway bluster fails to convince Senate