Quote du jour

From Pooty-Poot:

"I talked about my desire to promote institutional change in parts of the world, like Iraq where there's a free press and free religion, and I told him that a lot of people in our country would hope that Russia would do the same," Bush said.

To that, Putin replied, "We certainly would not want to have the same kind of democracy that they have in Iraq, quite honestly."

I must say, that is SOME BUBBLE aWol has. I consider it to be at least marginally insane to have any optimism about Iraq ever having real democracy, freedom of the press, or freedom of religion--especially at the hands of our fascist neocons. But considering Iraq, currently, to be a model for ANYONE is beyond crazy. Freedom of religion, in a country where dozens of people are killed each day for their religion--Sunnis kill people because they're Shiites, Shiites kill people because they're Sunnis, Americans kill people because they're Muslim. And anyone who thinks there is freedom of the press in Iraq hasn't read this interview with Newsweek's Baghdad bureau chief.

The restrictions on [journalists’] movements are very severe. It is extremely dangerous to move around anywhere in Iraq, but we do. We all have Iraqi staff who get around, and we go on trips arranged by the U.S. State Department as frequently as we can.

But the military has started censoring many [embedded reporting] arrangements. Before a journalist is allowed to go on an embed now, [the military] check[s] the work you have done previously. They want to know your slant on a story—they use the word slant—what you intend to write, and what you have written from embed trips before. If they don’t like what you have done before, they refuse to take you. There are cases where individual reporters have been blacklisted because the military wasn’t happy with the work they had done on embed. But we get out among the Iraqi public a whole lot more than almost any American official, certainly more than military officials do.

George! If you really want to promote democracy, start in the country where you actually have some authority. Get rid of the electronic voting machines, promote runoff voting, and stop shredding the Constitution.

BTW, a couple of days ago Chris Floyd wrote about the whackos W is backing to bring "democracy" to Russia. Not too much different from those other guys who tried to "liberate" Russia back in 1941 with Panzer tanks.