Bush Foes

Apparently, Tuesday was a good newsday for foes of The Administration, at least overseas:

George Galloway, antiwar member of the British House of Commons, and Cuban President Fidel Castro, veteran antagonist of the United States, both succeeded in turning the tables on Washington.

Galloway transformed a congressional hearing about the U.N. oil-for-food scandal into a fierce attack on the Bush administration's Iraq policies. On the same day, Castro relished the spectacle of U.S. law enforcement officers carrying out his long-standing demand to arrest accused airline bomber Luis Posada Carriles.

Both men, say commentators overseas, successfully put Washington on the defensive over apparent contradictions in America's war on terrorism.

...
Virtually every British news site quoted Galloway's riposte to the committee's published allegation that he had met "many times" with Hussein. "As a matter of fact," Galloway said according to the Times of London's transcript , "I met Saddam Hussein exactly the same number of times as Donald Rumsfeld met him. The difference is that Donald Rumsfeld met him to sell him guns, and to give him maps the better to target those guns."

Galloway was referring to two trips that Rumsfeld made to Iraq in 1983 and 1984. As a special U.S. envoy Rumsfeld offered financial and military incentives to Hussein to reestablish diplomatic relations with the United States at a time when U.S. officials regarded Iran -- with whom Iraq was engaged in a devastating war -- as a greater threat.

(A telling difference between the British and American press: The Washington Post, New York Times and Los Angeles Times chose not to mention the Rumsfeld line in their coverage. Rumsfeld's friendly overtures to Hussein 20 years ago have been reported before.)

The Guardian said " the culture clash between Mr. Galloway's bruising style and the soporific gentility of Senate proceedings could hardly have been more pronounced and drew audible gasps and laughs of disbelief from the audience."

This is key, of course, to the way Galloway succeeded in turning Coleman's hearings into a circus of hipocracy. It also is key in the way the American media represented the incident. The Washington Post itself omitted any and every reference to Rumsfeld or The Administration during their original reporting, because, as is stated, "Rumsfeld's friendly overtures...have been reported before." It sounds to me like the Washington Post is relying on Michael Moore's cultural reporting to fill in the holes they have no interest in filling.

As for Castro, it goes without saying that the coverage of his Administrative table-turning has fallen completely by the wayside.

Galloway get's covered because he's bombastic and Scottish. Castro dismissed because... he's Castro. But this whole time we're still talking about Newsweek and the Koran riots as though A) the Administration didn't douse the field in gasoline; and B) the events themselves didn't actually happen.

We need some of those spikey Brits over here to start bristling through The Administration. Our media is complacent in the destruction, which certainly helps our culture to be as well.