Do We Have To?

I've heard that President Bush is now planning on monthly press conferences. It they are going to be as pathetic as today's, I say, thanks, but no thanks. Let's just skip it. We've all seen Bush do this before: respond with non-sequiturs to avoid questions, use vague assertions as facts, and when not dodging, misleading. He's not even fun to watch doing it, the way Ari Fleischer used to be.

And it would spare us all the embarrassment of knowing the President of the United States said something like this:

In terms of Uzbekistan -- thanks for bringing it up -- we've called for the International Red Cross to go into the Andijon region to determine what went on, and we expect all our friends, as well as those who aren't our friends, to honor human rights and protect minority rights. That's part of a healthy and a peaceful -- peaceful world, will be a world in which governments do respect people's rights. And we want to know fully what took place there in Uzbekistan, and that's why we've asked the International Red Cross to go in.

As with so many things Bushian, the BS in this statement is so folded in multiple layers that it resembles a samurai sword of rhetorical crap.

First, is there anyone outside of Bush who doesn't acknowledge that, at the very least, something awful happened? Most disputes involve how many hundreds are dead, and whether the troops brazenly gunned down women and children in the process. There are already enough reliable eye-witness accounts, including those from Westerners on the scene, that the suggestion to wait for the ICRC to check it out is absurd. The British, who we certainly believed about Iraq, have already decried the massacre. Jack Straw said "The situation is very serious; there has been a clear abuse of human rights, a lack of democracy and a lack of openness." Hear that, George? He said "clear abuse of human rights." Layer One.

Layer Two: the ICRC is the same organization we willfully misled by keeping prisoners "off the books" in Iraq. The administration laughed at the ICRC, and now we're supposed to think the Red Cross is a fact-finding branch of the US government?

Layer Three: Is he really asserting that his policy is that the US should rely on international organizations? At the same time as he is demanding confirmation of a fanatic anti-internationalist to the UN?

Layer Four: Is he really asserting that we want those international organizations to tell us how to treat our own allies? Remember, Uzbekistan isn't some far-off dictatorship we long ago cut off relations with. Uzbekistan is a far-off dictatorship we've paid millions so we could keep a big airbase there. There are US armed forces there as we speak! We have people there, the Uzbek government is supposedly "our friend", and yet we have to wait to hear back from the ICRC? Before we can even acknowledge killings took place? Karimov himself says people died, though they were "islamists."

I could go on, but I've got other things to do. And that's just what he said about Uzbekistan. Once again, I succumb to the Republican's strategy of MIRV'd bullshit attacks. A person just can't keep up with refuting the things they say. There's just too much wrong. Just too much wrong.