The president took time out of his busy schedule of tanking in the opinion polls today to chide Congress for neglecting its duties and, in his words, "...sorting out the historical record of the Ottoman Empire." He's referring to a resolution, passed out of committee last week and heading for a vote in the House at some point in the future (but, at least according to NPR this afternoon, losing support right and left), that criticizes the genocide committed against the Armenian minority in the waning days of the Ottoman Empire in 1915.
Modern Turkey is extraordinarily (not to say pathologically) sensitive about that blot upon its national history. In a fit of pique after the congressional committee approved the resolution on a largely party-line vote last week, Ankara recalled its ambassador and has begun to threaten retaliatory measures that would make it far more difficult for Bush to keep his surge in Iraq going. That was the primary reason that the pretzelnit thought Congress should keep its historical opinions to itself and not go out of its way to antagonize "an important ally."
Hold that thought, because I'm going to switch gears for a second and move to another story that was also in the news today. Roughly three hours after appearing in the White House Briefing Room to excoriate Congress for pissing off an important ally, Mr. Bush went up to Capitol Hill to piss off another important ally, China, by presenting the Dalai Lama with the Congressional Gold Medal, the U.S.'s top civilian honor. Can we say "self-referential incoherence," boys and girls?
Just to recap, in the morning Bush said that pissing off Turkey by telling the truth about the Armenian genocide was bad. Then after lunch, he went to the other end of Pennsylvania Avenue to piss off the Chinese by doing the right thing and paying tribute to one of the world's most tireless advocates for peace, himself a victim of Chinese malfeasance.
It would appear, therefore, that Bush is yet again reserving unto himself the right to decide which allies of ours it is safe to piss off, for what reasons, and at what times. No one else is, apparently, allowed to piss off our allies for any reason--even if they're right. Got that?
Frankly, it's as clear as mud to me: apart from the petty partisan politicking, of course, which is both de rigueur and older than Moses's toes. The only reason Bush gives a shit about what Congress thinks about Turkey, Armenians, or genocide isn't that it's pissing off Turkey so much as it is that Turkey is threatening to impede his ability to sustain his endless war on whatever it is we're fighting this particular moment in Iraq. Otherwise, he wouldn't care--and he probably wouldn't have had to have someone brief him this morning on what the Ottoman Empire was, where it was located, who the Armenians were, what the Ottomans did to them, and why. And the main reason Bush took time to castigate Congress for having an opinion on the subject this morning was, of course, because it gave him another opportunity to paint the Democrats in Congress as time-wasters--one of the only subjects in all the world on which Mr. Bush is an expert.
It would be interesting to see a fisk of Bush's press conference this morning, detailing all the things on which Congress is, according to Bush, dragging its feet and/or wasting its time, alongside a listing of all the things that Bush has dragged his feet on, vetoed, axed, or just plain refused to discuss. It would be equally amusing to see a moment-by-moment comparison of how the 110th Congress has spent its time during its first year in office, as opposed to the way the Boy Who Would Be King spent his first 365 days in office. I believe Mr. Bush officially became the president most likely to go on vacation about a year into his present term, when he eclipsed Mr. Reagan's record of some 400+ days off in office (not including all the times when Ronnie simply slept through his official duties without bothering to pay attention--something which Bush is probably also quite good at doing). I believe there is an old saying about stones and people who live in glass houses that one of his few remaining aides would do well to whisper into the pretzelnit's ear long about now, before he embarrasses himself yet again in the national media.
All that said, I think Bush (and Turkey) are flat wrong about the Armenian genocide issue, China is flat-wrong about the Dalai Lama and its continuing occupation of Tibet, and Bush and Congress were absolutely right, and perfectly within their rights, both to receive him in Washington and to bestow upon him the Congressional Gold Medal. The Turks did slaughter hundreds of thousands of Armenians in the early days of the First World War, and the Turkish people have never really either faced up to that fact or done anything meaningful to atone for it. They should do both, quickly, and get it over with--and then they can stop worrying that each time they pick up a newspaper, they're going to see another headline about the issue. The current Turkish government is behaving like a petulant child by recalling its ambassador and attempting to interfere with the passage of men and materiel to and from the Iraqi war zone over the actions of a congressional committee who simply recognized an historical fact that should have been acknowledged and buried at least six decades ago.
Bush should shut the hell up about Congress's involvement in the dispute, and he should really shut up about how the Congress is supposedly shirking its duties. That's a can of worms that you don't want to have opened, Georgie. It will not end well for you--and given that your approval rating has sunk to about the same level as Tricky Dicky's did just before they impeached his ass in 1974, now is not a time when you can afford to become any less popular than you already are.
China needs to get the hell out of Tibet, a sovereign nation which it has illegally occupied and ruthlessly plundered for the last 40 years. And we need to tell Beijing that we will meet with whomever we please, wherever and whenever we please, and if they don't like it they are free to go suck eggs--in return for which, we will be graciously pleased not to press them too hard on cracking down on the rampant piracy and theft of U.S. intellectual property which goes on under Beijing's nose, and which costs this country and its economy tens of millions of dollars each year that we can ill afford to lose, given our gross imbalance of trade with China. And what goes for Tibet goes equally for Taiwan. Neither place belongs under Beijing's sway, no matter how much Beijing may pretend otherwise--and they're going to have to learn to live with that, too.
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