Hitting the Mute Button on the Freedom Agenda

It has been a humbling few days for the administration and its attempts to exercise American power. Last week, Bush aides begged Musharraf not to suspend the constitution – and he ignored them.

Similarly, Bush met in the Oval Office yesterday with Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan, urging him not to send troops into Iraq to fight Kurdish militants – and Erdogan evidently gave him no commitment.

Goes to show what kind of “mandate” Bush has.

Just last Thursday, President Bush spoke of his Freedom Agenda spreading democracy across the globe: “We are standing with those who yearn for liberty.”

Yesterday, the Bush administration unveiled a pragmatic new foreign policy: The Stand by Your Man Agenda.

In the intervening period, Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf, a U.S. ally, had suspended his country’s constitution, arrested Supreme Court judges, closed media outlets, and beat or imprisoned demonstrators by the hundreds – using some of his billions of dollars in American military aid to impose martial law.

Posted by Dilated_Rebel
Born and raised very humbly in a “small town” in southern California, I was a product of different worlds. Literally, part of my family descends from Mexico the rest from Portugal and Uruguay. This mixture had kept me from supporting any racist psyche found...