Sometimes when one listens to RTÉ covering an issue, one gets the impression that those who run the station think that balance is what results when the interviewer takes sides. Saturday View is a model of such broadcasting techniques, never more so than last weekend, and the only reason I did not kick my radio into earth orbit was that in my rage, I was quite unable to unplug it.
RTÉ's liberal agenda was typified in the discussion about Martin Cullen's presence in New York for the return of the 69th infantry battalion of the US National Guard from Iraq.
Joan Burton took the usual left-wing view and declared that the US presence in Iraq was illegal.
There was someone else, whose name I didn't catch, who accused the US troops of murder.
And we had Mícheál Martin, representing the Government. That was it: two against one against the Government, odds which clearly did not appeal to presenter Rodney Rice.
Because he then weighed in against the Minister, declaring that Ireland was neutral in the conflict in Iraq.
Such is the usual, unthinking, pious, right-on rubbish one can expect from RTÉ when neutrality and the US get mentioned in the same sentence.
So here goes. We are NOT neutral in this struggle. NOT. Get it? And it's a pity Mícheál Martin didn't have the presence of mind to declare this truth.
The US military occupation of Iraq legally ceased on June 28th, 2004, and was followed by a UN-authorised military presence in the country.
Last November, the UN Security Council voted unanimously to extend the mandate of the nearly 180,000-strong multinational force in Iraq for another year.
In the Taoiseach's own words, respect for the UN Security Council is the cornerstone of our foreign policies: "We want a United Nations which is united in purpose as well as in name. We want a United Nations that is respected.
"We need a Security Council which is capable and willing of ensuring that its resolutions are fully implemented."
One of those Security Council resolutions authorises the allied presence in Iraq.
The Minister for Foreign Affairs last year defined our Government's attitude towards Iraq.
"It is clear that insurgent attacks are being targeted increasingly at Iraqi security forces and election officials, in an attempt to prevent elections taking place, and at ordinary Iraqi citizens, to try and provoke civil strife. This is something to which no one who believes in democracy can remain indifferent. I commend all those Iraqis - election officials, police and ordinary voters - who refuse to bow to this intimidation, and exercise their right to elect representatives of their choice." It couldn't be clearer. We are not neutral - "indifferent" in the Minister's words - in the Iraqi struggle, and only the most precious and morally irresponsible could maintain that we either are or should be. That allied forces might occasionally have gone out of control and committed atrocities does not take away from the general rightness of their cause.
Their presence in Iraq was authorised by the democratically elected government in Baghdad and by a unanimous vote of the UN Security Council.
It is virtually impossible for a military occupation to possess a greater legal and moral validity. But of course, it's equally impossible to hear that opinion on RTÉ.
The issue is simple. The 69th were lawfully present in Iraq. Tragically, while there they were involved in the killing of an Italian agent.
But it is not the operating norm of US forces to go round shooting people because the mood so takes them.
The odd soldier breaking under the strain and doing stupid or even wicked things does not invalidate the merits of the overall cause, any more than the rapes of French women by allied soldiers in Normandy in 1944 - and they happened - invalidated the allied cause in 1944.
But those like Joan Burton and Senator David Norris - one of the most hysterically vociferous opponents of the US presence in Iraq - cannot propose unconditional and immediate US withdrawal as if that solves everything. For it is morally feckless to pretend that the solution to Iraq's travails is for the US to leave the population to Abu Musab al-Zarqawi's merry band of beheaders.
Of course, such opponents of US policy are repeatedly allowed to get away with their undergraduate and irresponsible pose-striking on Radio Teilifís Egregious.
That the US made terrible mistakes in the early days of the occupation merely increases the obligation of allied forces there to protect the nascent democratic institutions of Iraq.
Thus moral duty is added to the Iraqi government invitation and UN authorisation as reasons why the US must stay on in Iraq.
What more do you want? It would have been an insufferable insult to the 69th and the US army generally for Martin Cullen not to have accepted the honour of welcoming the National Guardsmen home from Iraq.
They were lawfully there on a UN mandate, authorised unanimously by the Security Council, in a motion co-sponsored by Denmark, Japan and Romania, and at the request of the Iraqi prime minister, Ibrahim al-Jaafari.
I'm delighted that Army pipers also had the honour to be playing at the return of their American brothers-in-arms.
Everyone knows the war began on false premises, and with false hopes, but that is now for historians to dissect and condemn.
For whatever one feels about the war's origins, few democrats would dispute that an insurgent victory in Iraq could well be a geopolitical calamity that, in all its evil consequences, might even rank with the assassination of the Archduke.