It’s the right thing to do
Posted by Ron Coleman on October 11, 2007
One reason to like George Bush more than Jerry Ford:
US President George W. Bush will risk angering China by attending a ceremony next week to award a Congress medal to the exiled Tibetan leader, the Dalai Lama, at the bastion of American democracy[, the Capitol].
What does the late, mediocre Jerry Ford have to do with this? You mean, you don’t remember when Ford, afraid of upsetting our then-would-be-masters (also Reds, yes!, now that you mention it), refused to make a similar gesture to Nobel Prize winner Alexander Solzhenitsyn, the prophet of Communism’s tragedy.
It’s a different time; the power equations are, somewhat, different; the dissidents and their messages are, perhaps, not the same. But the contrast between two Republican Presidents is what is most compelling.
Ara Rubyan said
US President George W. Bush will risk angering China
…but on the other hand he won’t risk angering Turkey.
I’m not impressed.
zach said
Ara,
thinking the same thing. If Bush were in Ford’s shoes he would have made the same decision. The politics vis a vis China are too different now to compare. We can afford to piss them off because they’re too heavily invested in U.S. success and good-relations.