Burma! He Said Burma!

I was very pleased to hear President Bush mention Burma in his State of the Union speech last night.

And we will continue to speak out for the cause of freedom in places like Cuba, Belarus, and Burma - and continue to awaken the conscience of the world to save the people of Darfur.

He put it right up there with Darfur, and Castro's colon. I knew I liked this president. This guy was a little less pleased. He felt the president should have talked about New Orleans instead.

One of these days, lord forbid, a dirty bomb or a horrible storm will get a clean hit on another patch we call home. Lives will be lost, people’s careers will be disabled and they will beg for the help of their fellow Americans. Hopefully, when that happens, the President will not be giving the same speech he gave only one week before about a war we never should have engaged. Hopefully, the President will remember that America might have the heart of gold, the best of intentions abroad, but that the people of this nation who make up that land of the free and home of the brave are not slaves to the President’s obsession with saving countries that are hardly on the map.

Burma? President Bush. You are really a fool.

Pretending, for a moment, that we've heard nothing of stolen and abused federal funds for Katrina victims, and that the local governments involved were not completely useless, I still feel that it's at least a little more important to draw attention to, and try to rally world opinion to stop, genocide than it is to reinforce levees around flood plains so that people can rebuild in said low-lying areas.

Here's what Bishop Tutu thinks about Burma:

The retired South African archbishop urged the Security Council to take action against the military regime of the South-east Asian country, in a 2005 report written with fellow Nobel laureate and former Czech President Vaclav Havel.

"I am deeply disappointed by our vote. It is a betrayal of our own noble past. Many in the international community can hardly believe it. It is inexplicable," Tutu said in an e-mail no Saturday to the Associated Press.

In its first vote since it secured a non-permanent seat on the Security Council last year, South Africa joined China and Russia in opposing the resolution proposed by the United States and backed by Britain and France.

I'm with Tutu and Vaclav Havel.

Save the Christians! Save the Karens!