April 14, 2007
For all of the lovely, lovely speeches about liberty and democracy and freedom and all those great American values those unreasonable Iraqi's simply refuse to thank us for, George Bush stands by, completely oblivious or ignorant or just plain complicit as Russia slides back into dictatorship.
Under Putin, the Kremlin has steadily been increasing its ownership or control of television, radio, and internet news outlets. It just took over the Russian News Service (through proxy), and called a meeting with the journalists employed there. From now on, they were told, no coverage of the opposition. No bad news about the economy or politics within Russia. The United States is our enemy. And at least 50% of the newscast will be devoted to "happy news".
And George Bush stands by and smiles and appears completely uninterested.
How on earth can Bush continue to declare that the goal of the war on Iraq is to bring freedom and democracy to that nation, while clearly conveying utter indifference to the state of democracy within Russia, or Egypt, or Libya, or Saudi Arabia? Well, that's not difficult at all to understand, unless you ever really believed the statements about democracy.