Monkey See, Monkey Do (BR)Our bad example bites back, kills thousands

It appears our president might have more admirers in the world community than one would surmise based on a casual glance around the globe.

Unfortunately, one among them is the chief executive of Sudan, military dictator Omar al-Bashir. Though unilateral military action, haughty derision of the United Nations and denial of the popularly-accepted scale of violence in military conflicts has netted George W. Bush huge props from American conservatives, for some reason the same crowd isn't all that crazy about the same attitude from a Muslim autocrat. Weird, I know.

NPR reports that al-Bashir held a "rare video conference" with the world press yesterday, the aim of which being to play down the severity of the situation in Sudan's Darfur region, which the United States, the U.N. and several other bodies have labeled as genocide. The Sudanese leader, who clearly takes exhaustive notes while watching FOX News, accused the press of hyping Darfur in order to turn public opinion against his nation, thus serving U.S. foreign policy and business goals in the region. Al-Bashir's translator expressed the President's frustration at the lack of a direct Arabic equivalent of "liberal media."

Bush knows he must step lightly in dealing with al-Bashir, whose undemocratic and generally mercliless regime is a nominal ally in the war on terror. Meanwhile the people of Darfur who aren't fortunate enough to be hacked to pieces by machete-wielding militiamen slowly starve to death. What's that saying? Something about reaping and sowing?