Oh, the Hypocrisy!
It isn't often that I read Tammy Bruce's right-leaning blog, but Salon.com's link to her site on Tuesday caught my attention. Tammy, to her credit, took the Bush Administration, and Condi Rice in particular, to task over the meeting of the Middle Eastern minds in Maryland. Tammy had two charges; 1) that, "this summit, only give(s) aid and comfort to the beasts of the world," and 2) that Rice and the Administration are engaging in rank hypocrisy for hosting these Middle Eastern leaders, including Syria's Bashar Assad, in light of the fact that the Administration, and many Republicans, gave Democratic House Speaker Nancy Pelosi endless grief for meeting with Assad back in April. The Bush Administration had charged at the time that Pelosi's visit to Syria had given legitimacy and the usual aid-and-comfort to a sponsor of terrorism.
While I think that, in the long run, more can be accomplished by maintaining a dialogue with even the most reprehensible of Middle Eastern leaders (who the hell else do we have to talk to in that region?), as opposed to simply ignoring them, and that puts me a bit at odds with Tammy's apparent wish that Bush dismiss leaders such as Assad entirely, I must agree with her that the hypocrisy is outrageous.
As Republican presidential hopeful Mike Huckabee said, "...Public figures who have spoken in one way and maybe acted in a different way... Frankly Americans will forgive us for being sinners. They won't forgive us for being hypocrites."
