It Was A Joke Guys

The "Bush doctrine" as I've written before (and before even that) has not so much died, as it never really existed. Even now though there are those who have not learned this lesson, as Ken Silverstein points out after listing a long series of shockingly naive op-eds in the Washington Post that bemoan Bush's betrayal of his own so-called "freedom agenda":

Indeed, the Post has been spotting the Bush Administration making a mockery of the freedom agenda virtually from the moment the policy was declared. In yet another column on the topic, Diehl (discussing the “de facto reversal of Bush’s freedom agenda”) asked, “Who can make sense of this disaster?”

Listen, Diehl, I know I’m not as smart as you are with your fancypants Yale degree, but let me have a crack at it: There never was a freedom agenda. Bush simply repackaged rhetoric used by past administrations about America’s commitment to democracy abroad, and cut the same deals they did that gave a free pass to dictators willing to support American foreign policy objectives.

Outside of American newspaper editorial pages, the “freedom agenda” is a joke. Pro-American despots across the globe know they’ll pay no consequences for jailing opponents and cracking down on the press, which is why they do it so routinely and scornfully. But rest assured, the next time a Bush-friendly dictator tightens the screws, the Post editorial page will once again bemoan the administration’s lack of action and scratch its collective head and wonder how things went so terribly, terribly wrong.

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