Bush Can Say Whatever, But God Forbid Anyone Else

The whining going on, especially from the far right in the media and on the blogs, about the criticism leveled at President Bush on the floor of the UN General Assembly just strikes me as enormously blind considering Bush's own behavior and love to oversimplify and demonize people.

First, we keep hearing, "How dare Chavez call Bush the devil on American soil?"

Well, the U.S. - specifically, lower Manhattan in the shadow of the ghosts from the twin towers that fell on 9-11-01 - does house the United Nations. I believe the U.S. pretty much insisted on having the U.N. on its soil when it was started. So yeah, the Bush criticisms have taken place by foreign leaders on American soil.

But within the U.N. itself, this is not an American stage - except that we try to bully the U.N. at every turn.

Second, there's an issue of context. You can't look at what Chavez and Ahmadinejad have said without examining what Bush has done.

Bush has used this very same U.N. stage to entreat the world to join his war on terror which has done nothing but terrorize the entire world, to demonize whole nations and/or specific other national leaders, and to lie expressly (either directly or through his agents like Colin Powell and John Bolton and John Negroponte, to name but a few) for the purpose of trying to force the rest of the world into its actions in Iraq.

Remember Axis of Evil? Remember all the "crusade" talk that made it sound like American Christians were about to ride in and slay Islam?

And no, I won't even give time to Rush Limbaugh's insistence that "Hollywood" types like Susan Sarandon and Danny Glover as well as progressives and columnists like Frank Rich and Maureen Dowd are the ones who "benefit" from everyone dumping on Bush.