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Sunday, July 06, 2008

Birthday Boy

Fredo spends his final birfday in office gladhanding at the G8 Summit, surely not what he had in mind for a holiday/birthday weekend. (As someone whose birthday is also on a holiday weekend -- Memorial Day -- I can relate. I like to make a full weekend of R&R out of it, not just the one day.)

So, because I'm refreshed and full of good food and beer and just sunburned enough to give my pale Scots-Irish-Slav ass some blessed color, I'm feeling a wee bit magnanimous, just enough to acknowledge that he's right about something:

"I also am realistic enough to tell you that if China and India don't share the same aspiration that we're not going to solve the problem," Bush said.


It's true. One in two people -- every second person on the planet -- is in Asia, mostly in either China or India. And everyone's moved operations to those places. Nothing significant can be done without them.

Of course, even when he's right, he's wrong. China and India are still in the mid-to-late stages of ramping up their economies and infrastructures in the process of globalization. They're not going to monkey-wrench their economic development just to make him happy. They may not have immediately followed suit if we had joined in the Kyoto Protocol, but there was never any question about what they would do if we didn't.

That's the thing that should dog him to the bitter end. He didn't even try. Whether the issue has been foreign policy, the environment, or economics, these guys seemed to think that they had swinging dicks they could wave at the problem and scare it away. The fact that problems only worsened in all those areas should be a clue to them that their dicks were never nearly as big as their courtesans told them they were.

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

Heywood, did you see this?

http://www.centerface.blog-city.com/the_towel_snapper_embarrasses_america_yet_again.htm

Heywood J. said...

"Il DuceBag". Awesome. I'll probably steal that sooner or later.

As far as "Yo Harper" or "Yo Blair" goes, I'm actually kinda surprised that Fredo never got around to giving them the usual Pinto/Flounder type nicknames he bestows on other people, especially reporters.

It's very passive aggressive behavior; with the reporters an open emphasis on his antagonistic, sometimes hostile relationship with them. With other world leaders, at the very least it clearly shows that Bush regards them as subordinates, to the U.S. in general and to him in particular.

If some Spanish or Dutch judge decides to make it a little more difficult for Bush, Cheney, and/or Rumsfeld to travel out the country, they'll have my thanks, and I wouldn't be surprised if it were at least partly fueled by Bush's attitude and demeanor toward them, not just his deeds.

Anonymous said...

no doubt china and india can easily become a superpower if they face the future together.