“President Bush stop him. Stop this visit. Stop the killing and torture.”
Those words were shouted by an unknown protester at President Bush and Chinese President Hu Jintao this morning. I won’t go on long because this has been said a million times before and will be repeated a million times over by people better able to speak (write) certain fundamental truths than I am. Can one nation that practices torture and detains prisoners indefinitely, without trial, ask another to stop doing the same? Certainly it can, but the words are meaningless. Pure futility. Think about this for a second; if you didn’t know the context of the quote, would you know whether the woman who shouted those words was shouting them about China or the United States? I wouldn’t. Our nation has been defiled by a fool. He’ll be gone in 33 months, but the damage he’s done may never leave us.