LAURA BUSH ORDERS MYANMAR TO ACCEPT AMERICAN AID

The Bushes, George and Laura, seem to love telling other people and countries what to do. "You must do this, you must do that!"

Today, Laura Bush holds a news conference in front of the White House seal, and she tells the rulers of Myanmar what to do. "You must allow American relief efforts!" "You must take in American aid!" Is there no end to the the Bush proscriptions?

I grant you, the rulers of Myanmar are militaristic dictators, willing to send out their thugs to kill and beat up protesting Myanmar citizens. And it seems they are incapable of providing adequate relief efforts for those of its citizens who have lost all their homes and possessions to the recent cyclone.

But why must Laura Bush be the policewoman of the world? Instead of ordering other countries to do her bidding, notwithstanding the humanitarian benefits, why can't she and George engage in quiet diplomacy instead of public shaming?

No wonder George Bush, as U.S. president, has lost the good will of the rest of the world. People don't like to be ordered about as if children. A lesson, it seems, that has been lost on George and Laura Bush.

INAPPROPRIATE SUBSERVIENCE - NANCY PELOSI KISSES POPE'S RING

I realize that House Speaker Nancy Pelosi is a Catholic born and raised in a Catholic family from Baltimore. But why did she think it necessary to kiss the Pope's hand when she met him yesterday? I hardly ever disagree with Speaker Pelosi and I hardly ever agree with George and Laura Bush, especially when it comes to foreign policy and W's war-making around the world. However, the Bushes handled it just right when they merely shook hands with the Pope but Nancy Pelosi did it all wrong.

Kissing the Pope's hand or ring is unseemly and inappropriate for a public official of the United States. It is a throw back to medieval practices that were meant to demonstrate fealty and subservience. Someone should have warned Nancy Pelosi. I am ashamed and embarrassed by her ring-kissing.

WHY NOTHING FROM GEORGE AND LAURA BUSH ON SAUDI TREATMENT OF 19-YEAR-OLD WOMAN GIVEN 200 LASHES?

Now we have the Saudi Foreign Minister in Annapolis for the meeting tomorrow. And still no apology or retraction of the unfair and barbaric sentence imposed upon that 19-year-old Saudi young woman caught in a car with a man not a relative. And this after the 19-year-old was gang-raped and sexually humiliated by seven males. A Saudi court convicted the girl and gave her a punishment of 200 lashes plus time in prison.

To see how the Saudi court treats this victim and makes her into the criminal is unjust. The penalty of 200 lashes is not only medieval and cruel, it is barbaric and backward. It violates the international Declaration of Human Rights and human rights of woman.

Here is a section from Declaration of the Rights of Woman, 1791, written by Olympe de Gouges way back in 1791:

"Man, are you capable of being just? It is a woman who poses the question; you will not deprive her of that right at least. Tell me, what gives you sovereign empire to oppress my sex? Your strength? Your talents? Observe the Creator in his wisdom; survey in all her grandeur that nature with whom you seem to want to be in harmony, and give me, if you dare, an example of this tyrannical empire. Go back to animals, consult the elements, study plants, finally glance at all the modifications of organic matter, and surrender to the evidence when I offer you the means; search, probe, and distinguish, if you can, the sexes in the administration of nature. Everywhere you will find them mingled; everywhere they cooperate in harmonious togetherness in this immortal masterpiece.

"Man alone has raised his exceptional circumstances to a principle. Bizarre, blind, bloated with science and degenerated--in a century of enlightenment and wisdom--into the crassest ignorance, he wants to command as a despot a sex which is in full possession of its intellectual faculties; he pretends to enjoy the Revolution and to claim his rights to equality in order to say nothing more about it."

This Declaration was written some 217 years before the Saudi court imposed this unfair sentence on this young woman this year for exercising her basic human rights.

Where is George Bush, great defender of freedom and democracy, in speaking out against this Saudi outrage? And where is Laura Bush, defender of the rights of women throughout the Moslem world? So far, we have heard nothing from either George or Laura. The government of the United States is silent on this most unjust violation of human rights. What hypocrisy!