An excellent opinion piece was in the Sunday Sacramento Bee today, reprinted from the Nation by their Washington correspondent, John Nichols. It's a well pointed assertion that the Bush administration, as well as our State Department, made virtually no attempt to diplomatically pressure Musharraf and the government of Pakistan to protect Benazir Bhutto's safety which could have helped to prevent her assassination. In the final lines of the article (which, oddly, were paragraphed differently in the Bee reprint) Mr. Nichols states:

This is a time for mourning. But it is, as well, a time for somber reflection on the utterly failed and fully dysfunctional foreign policies of the Bush-Cheney administration.

The world is a more dangerous place today.

The failure of George Bush and those around him to premise their relationship with Pervez Musharraf on the absolute demand that Benazir Bhutto be kept safe and alive made it so.

Now, the question is whether members of Congress -- Republicans and Democrats -- will step forward to say that the relationship that George Bush has established and maintained with Pervez Musharraf is no longer morally or practically tenable.

I have an answer for that question.

And the answer is- no! Those pussies won't do a thing since they're just as voluntarily brainwashed as Dubya into believing that this fatigue-wearing poseur Musharraf is going to help flush out Osama Bin Laden and help make the world safe for democracy again. Well, maybe Ron Paul would support cutting aid to Pakistan but he'd only do so because it would save tax dollars.

Read the full Nation piece: Click Here, Pilgrim

For more work by Jimmy Margulies, whose cartoon I stole to illustrate this blog entry, Click Here, Pilgrim