This is one of those days where I realize I'm tired of the leaders of my country making deals with devils. I'm tired of reading every day of blatant hypocrisy from the Bush administration, tired of being ashamed of him and his government, and of all the people who support him for narrow ideological reasons while willfully ignoring the damage he's doing to those who can least afford it.

One of the things that saddens me the most is the President's dealing with, supporting, financing, and protecting dictatorships around the world while paying lip service to "fighting for democracy" overseas. This is something that everyone--liberal and conservative, Christian and atheist, right and left--should be up in arms over. Yet days, months, years go by without any accountability.

You only have to pay attention to what's out there right now to see multiple examples of this. One is Sudan. The White House has been timid and ineffectual in dealing with the ongoing crisis there, much like the hesitation shown by our government toward Bosnia during the Clinton years. Despite some fits of tough talk, the White House has been backing down from taking strong action and has quietly been trying to get Sudan off the public agenda. Meanwhile, in the words of Human Rights Watch:

The Janjaweed and Sudanese armed forces continued a campaign begun in earnest in 2003 of ethnic cleansing and forced displacement by bombing and burning villages, killing civilians, and raping women. The first half of 2004 saw a dramatic increase in these atrocities. By year’s end hundreds of villages were destroyed, an estimated 2 million civilians were forcibly displaced by the government of Sudan and its militias, and 70,000 died as a direct or indirect cause of this campaign.

Bush has talked a lot about the plight of civilians in Iraq and Afghanistan, for good reason; but here is a situation that in its pervasiveness and alarming immediacy is much worse. Yet Bush does nothing. I could make claims on this regarding the color of its residents' skin, or the influence of Sudan's large oil reserve, but for now I'll leave such areas of inquiry to the gentle reader. Thankfully, some are not waiting for the deadbeat president but are taking matters into their own hands. Bravo, Illinois.

Another pertinent example is Uzbekistan. Over two years ago, in my essay on the cycle of corruption in our dealings with Iraq, I singled out Uzbekistan as an example of our government's tragic habit of supporting dictators in areas of strategic or oil-related significance. Recent news reports have highlighted ongoing violence against the populace their by its brutal government, but this is nothing new--Uzbekistan has a long history of human-rights abuse. Yet Bush has placated this dictatorship due to the Uzbek cooperation in our "war on terror" (the definition of which seems to only narrow with time). I even came across a document today which shows, with heartbreaking understatement, the long-term connections between Bush, ravenous corporate interests, and corrupt dictatorships.

I could go on, but all the evidence is there for any observant reader. We invade Iraq unprovoked over phony weapons programs while leaving North Korea, a legitimate threat possessing nuclear capability, in a bizarre limbo. We blast out inflamed rhetoric over Iran's supposed development of nuclear technology while giving a free pass to another technically rogue nuclear state, Israel. We speak, teary-eyed, of bringing hope and freedom to the rest of the world. Yet we sell out our own people by exporting jobs as fast as we can and throwing our markets wide open to systematic human-rights abusers like China.

It's very simple, really. The White House bases its actions on furthering bottom-line issues of corporate wealth and military dominance, but bases its rhetoric on ideological absolutes. The disconnect between the two is obvious to any mildly critical observer, and creates a bizarre scenario where questioning the actions of the administration is turned into questioning freedom, religion, and democracy itself, as though, pharoah-like, Bush is not merely leading the country but is the very living personification of its virtues.

Just today Bush said, when speaking about stem-cell research, "We should not use public money to support the further destruction of human life." This is a perfect case of his muddying the water with absolute language, rather than approaching an issue with any sort of intellectual rigor. When I read that quote, the first thought in my mind was "Iraq." If the President really means what he said, then he's a hypocrite. And, sadly, the same goes for everyone who supports him--a man responsible for many executions, thousands of Iraqi deaths, and turning a blind eye to killing around the world--in the name of a "culture of life".

Labels: Politics