Four More years of this...

Thankfully I wasn't the only person who thought Bush's fairy-tale inauguration speech was heavy on the "I LOVE FREEDOM" blather, short on facts and dripping in hypocrisy.

As usual the Washington Post is right on:

"President Bush's soaring rhetoric yesterday that the United States will promote the growth of democratic movements and institutions worldwide is at odds with the administration's increasingly close relations with repressive governments in every corner of the world.

Some of the administration's allies in the war against terrorism -- including Egypt,
Saudi Arabia, Pakistan and Uzbekistan -- are ranked by the State Department as among the worst human rights abusers. The president has proudly proclaimed his friendship with Russian President Vladimir Putin while remaining largely silent about Putin's dismantling of democratic institutions in the past four years.

Bush's speech "brought to a high level the gap between the rhetoric and reality in U.S. foreign policy,"

Human rights experts said Bush's commitment to freedom is undercut by such actions, as well as the administration's treatment of detainees and terrorist suspects at Guantanamo, the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq and Bagram air base in Afghanistan.

Kenneth Roth, executive director of Human Rights Watch, was struck by the fact that Bush mentioned "liberty" repeatedly but did not use the phrase "human rights" as an overriding goal.

The State Department, in its annual human rights report, has cited Uzbekistan for its "very poor" human rights record, including the torture and killing of citizens in custody for political reasons. There is virtually no freedom of speech or of the press.

Yet Bush met with Uzbekistan's president in 2002 and signed a declaration of "strategic partnership," and senior officials such as Secretary of State Colin L. Powell and Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld have visited the country. The United States "values Uzbekistan as a stable, moderate force in a turbulent region," the State Department said late last year."

Here's what I stated about our support of Uzbekistan 6 months ago:

The brutal oppression against Muslims in Uzbekistan is exactly what fosters the resentment and humiliation in young Arab men that spawns suicide bombers and breeds terrorism. We should be condemning this wicked leader for his acts of brutality and rallying the international community against such a man. Instead, we are giving him huge amounts of financial and military aid because he permitted the use of military bases in Uzbekistan for the U.S. attack on Afghanistan.

If we are ever going to win this war on terrorism, we must be steadfast in our commitment to the promotion of democratic ideals. We must not succumb to shortcuts or easy quick-fix solutions that are contradictory to the values we stand for. We cannot continue to support countries that stifle democratic expression and repress the will of their people. If we show to the world, that only those countries who demonstrate a true commitment to democracy will earn the full support of the United States both militarily and financially, then maybe we can begin to fight terrorism at it roots. But if we continue to repeat the mistakes of the past, then we are doomed to reap the carnage that we sew.