President Bush is feigning mild disappointment with Pakistan — probably because if he had his own way, he’d declare his own “state of emergency,” and have his own brand of blackshirts beat down any dissent. The clincher is that the U.S. has given close to $10B to Pakistan over the past five or six years. Ten billion dollars to a dictator who has repeatedly ignored diplomatic requests. Also amusing is the fact that they’re still calling Musharaff’s junta an “important ally” in the war on terror — so important, in fact, that Osama bin Laden takes refuge in his country, unchallenged. Of course my own crack-pot libertarian conspiracy theory is that the U.S. Government is the group that’s allowing OBL to run wild. Seriously, we have satellites that can read a serial number on a dollar bill from space, but you can’t find a six-foot-five terrorist who needs dialysis in the fucking mountains? But I digress.

The true colors of Statism are revealed in this little exchange between Bush and Musharraf: Regimes are condemned when they no longer cooperate with the Alpha-dog, unless they have something else to offer, in which case a full reprieve may be in order. If Iraq was really about liberation, we’d be figuring out when to start flying sorties over Islamabad; and every other country where dissent is oppressed. “Liberation” is the buzz-word used by the Pols to drum up support for unpopular wars, none of which are ever really about liberation.