Golly,

Ya' think that those Bush declarations of his belief in Democracy in the Middle East can get any more laughable?

Oh, yes, as ever, there's no bottom (without a Jimmy Jeff):

The Bush administration signaled Sunday that it would probably keep billions of dollars flowing to Pakistan’s military, despite the detention of human rights advocates and leaders of the political opposition by Gen. Pervez Musharraf, the country’s president...

President Bush has made spreading democracy a major foreign policy theme and his administration has quietly pushed General Musharraf for months to be more open to sharing power, going so far as to help broker talks between him and Benazir Bhutto, the leader of Pakistan’s largest opposition party.

But Mr. Bush has said nothing in public about General Musharraf’s latest action. His silence contrasts sharply to his reaction to the crackdown on dissidents in Myanmar last month.

Blowback is going to be a real beeyatch on this one.

For Example,

Among the hundreds of opponents now being jailed by the military regime of General Musharraf, an outstanding woman human rights activist Asma Jahangir has been put behind bars for 90 days...

Asma Jahangir is a leading Pakistani lawyer, head of the Pakistan Commission for Human Rights, and a special rapporteur of the UN Commission on Human Rights on extrajudicial, summary or arbitrary executions. She was heavily involved in the movement for the restoration of Chief Justice Iftikhar Chaudhry earlier this year. Ms Jahangir sent this message from her home in Lahore.

“Lawyers and civil society will challenge the government and the scene is likely to get uglier. We want friends of Pakistan to urge the United States administration to stop all support of the unstable dictator, as his lust for power is bringing the country close to a worse form of civil strife. It is now time for the international community to insist on preventive measures, otherwise cleaning up the mess may take decades…”

Another latest report buttresses Asma Jahangir’s assertion: “Less than 24 hours after the order was issued, militants in the Afghan border freed 211 captured Pakistani soldiers in exchange for the army’s decision to free 28 insurgents, including some allegedly connected to suicide attacks, officials said.

“Though they gave no explanation for the decision, it appeared to fly in the face of Musharraf’s claims that emergency rule was needed to make sure terrorists — dozens of whom he says have been freed by Pakistani courts — stay off the streets.”

Time after time after time, George Bush has made exactly the WRONG decision when faced with a crisis in this country.

Time after time after time, he has coddled Musharraf and looked the other way while the very thing Musharraf is supposed to prevent (at a minimum) grows stronger and stronger.

He is doing it again.

If Musharraf is not threatened by us with a cutoff in aid, and soon, this is going to be worse than we could possibly imagine. Pakistan has nukes and plenty of 'em. And we let them have them -- and then we accepted a crackdown in exchange for a phony war against Islamic extremism, though a war was being waged in a manner guaranteeing that such extremism would be worsened by Musharraf's actions.

We are enabling it again.