Weblog
04/17/01 06:34 PM: So, our boys are back
So, our boys are back from EvilCommieChina now. We had to put on a toughguy face while seeking their release. We didn’t want to do anything stupid to get China mad, but we couldn’t reveal any chinks in our armor, so to speak. (Bad word choice there, but it’s really the proper term) Now that they’ve been released, we’re free to step up the rhetoric, rescind our apology. It’s just playing up the toughguy facade again, this time without any obstacles to tiptoe around. Well, none that are making headlines, at least. But it’s all just smoke and mirrors. The U.S. government is pretty cozy with China for the most part. At least where business interests are concerned. The release of the soldiers soaked up our attention, letting the fact that just an hour earlier Ford announced that it will open a car factory in China. Does that mean that the soldiers’ release was a business deal? Doubtful. More likely, it was just business as usual, with Ford giving as much thought to the soldiers as it will to the workers in its factory. I can see the headlines now: Ford relocates corporate headquarters to Sierra Leone. I saw a couple minutes of Crossfire today. They were talking about the possibility of the Olympics coming to Beijing. They brought up an interesting point. One guy said that there would be positive effects because Chinese human rights abuses would be exposed. True, there would be pressure and there might be some articles attacking the Chinese government for that. But another guy raised the point that when the Olympics come to totalitarian states, the “radicals” get rounded up and muzzled beforehand, so there aren’t likely to be many firsthand accounts of abuses brought into the open during the Olympics, if they are held in Beijing.
Just one more thought. It was a U.S. SPY plane. None of this would ever have happened if we weren’t such nosy neighbors.
