I go to the BBC news page this morning and what do I see?
Two hypocritical articles staring back at me.

The first one spoke of Bush’s doubts for peace in Iraq.
The second has Bush warning Russia to quit messing with the rest of the Soviet bloc.

So I see the writing on the wall.
We can do as we please, when they’re on their knees.

If someone else should be the bully, and strike a neighbor.
We whine and complain, even though we lose favor.

This sad attempt at poetry serves merely to point out that nearly every day our foreign policy runs head-on into itself. We admonish the Palestinians for fighting for their homeland, yet we expect the soveriegn state of Iraq to roll over on our very whim.

As I posted in our forums a few days ago, America is founded on a contradiction. Indeed, many of our daily lives are contradictions. We drive Turbo Diesel Volvos with “Save the Rainforest” stickers. We buy glossy magazines that tell us how to communicate better, when their 400-page length gives time to only read. We accept, every day, that the poor among us did it to themselves and that the rich among us can’t possibly deserve it.

I have been there as well. It is a part of our culture, and we learn it very young. Remember all the talks about good sportsmanship just before the team yells “Let’s kill them!” Too often, I find myself without much personal sense of the big picture. I don’t feel how the world around me affects me on a daily basis. I seem to view events as individual circumstance and not a continuous flow of existence.

Maybe this is Bush’s problem. Perhaps, he is just not circumspect enough to reason out how idiotic he makes our country seem. Even the headline of that first article has a lot to say, “Bush ‘doubts’ Iraq will avert war.” Of course he doubts it. He knows that he is going to find a reason to blow the place up regardless of what Iraq does.

And all the while, he will be decrying Arafat’s name and cautioning Sharon to be “diplomatic.”