Our President, George Bush, enemy to all those that love freedom around the globe, is quite the spectacle. He trashes our democracy while claiming to embrace it. He says he wants freedom for everyone in the world, yet takes it away from his own citizens. Then when things go bad, he plays the victim card. Truly, utterly, hopelessly, pathetic.
From The Washington Post:
As he sat down with opposition leaders from authoritarian societies around the world, he gave voice to his exasperation. "You're not the only dissident," Bush told Saad Eddin Ibrahim, a leader in the resistance to Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak. "I too am a dissident in Washington. Bureaucracy in the United States does not help change. It seems that Mubarak succeeded in brainwashing them."
If he needed more evidence, he would soon get it. In his speech that day, Bush vowed to order U.S. ambassadors in unfree nations to meet with dissidents and boasted that he had created a fund to help embattled human rights defenders. But the State Department did not send out the cable directing ambassadors to sit down with dissidents until two months later. And to this day, not a nickel has been transferred to the fund he touted.Two and a half years after Bush pledged in his second inaugural address to spread democracy around the world, the grand project has bogged down in a bureaucratic and geopolitical morass, in the view of many activists, officials and even White House aides. Many in his administration never bought into the idea, and some undermined it, including his own vice president. The Iraq war has distracted Bush and, in some quarters, discredited his aspirations. And while he focuses his ire on bureaucracy, Bush at times has compromised the idealism of that speech in the muddy reality of guarding other U.S. interests.
Basically, Bush is a joke. His loyal friends in the White House even turn their back on his naive idealism about spreading democracy with brute force. Instead that brute force has created some of our most fearsome enemies, both where our troops are stationed at and at here at home. Our allies have grown frustrated with us and the masses hate George Bush, and have done so for far longer than the majority of Americans (his popularity dropped below 50% in early 2005).
At least we get it now, only one in four Americans approve of his behavior. His "dissident" status is one way to look at it. We all know that Bush lives in a bubble. That bubble happens to be in downtown Washington. Yet if he could look outside that bubble, he would see that he is not only a dissident in the capital, the antipathy is spread out from New York to California, and Oregon to Alabama.
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