Hats
Off to Talk Radio
I think it was folksinger Joan Baez who once sang,
"Some days are diamonds…some days are stones."
That’s a lot like listening to talk radio. You might sift
through hundreds of common, run-of-the-mill comments that could be
"taken for granite" just to find one sparkling gem.
Like light shining through a prism, one such comment leaped
out of my radio speaker last week while listening to the syndicated,
conservative Michael Savage show.
San Francisco-based Savage was discussing China’s selection as host of the
2008 Olympic games when one of his callers raised a point to reckon with.
He suggested that the powers that be were not strongly
protesting the choice of China, despite its reputation as the bully on the
block for human rights violations, flaming rhetoric and militaristic intent.
The point being that China might be forced to at least erect
more of a civilized façade for the next seven years because the world will
be watching. China’s reputation is at stake and the western world knows
it. So, by dangling a carrot in front of its nose, the internationalist
power brokers hope to put off or eliminate a future showdown over Taiwan,
etc.
Brilliant reasoning. Of course, minor protestations would
have to be uttered by low-level government officials for the sake of
pacifying human rights organizations and to make it appear we haven’t
completely lost our moral focus. Not that we ever let that bother us in the
past, when such "human rights" champions as Bill Clinton broke
their own campaign promises to maintain most favored nation trade status
with a country that employs slave labor, forced prison labor, mandatory
abortion and the like.
Will China be the big ape that puts on a tuxedo, hoping not
to be thrown out of the zoo-keepers’ ball? We’ll keep our eyes…and
bananas peeled.
In the meantime, the same wonderful Chinese authorities that
execute prisoners to sell and profit from recycling their body parts and
then charge the families of the victims for the bullets that killed their
carved up corpses tried to pull that same number on the United States
government. It appears their effort, thankfully, has been unsuccessful…at
least this time.
We all recall this spring’s U.S. "spy plane"
incident. Our EP-3 was damaged by a Chinese jet and forced to land on
Chinese soil. Chinese intelligence experts carved up that bird like a
Thanksgiving turkey, then forced us to ship the pieces back to America in
rented Russian cargo planes.
Adding insult to injury, the Chinese then sent American
taxpayers a one million dollar bill to reimburse them for their costs in
playing host to the uninvited plane and its crew.
We received an e-mail from a U.S. military oriented website
claiming the American government has no intention of paying China one
"red" cent. The one million dollar invoice will be returned
unpaid.
Bravo for Bush! At last, we have something to cheer about.
It’s time somebody in Washington showed some spine…and
now that Beijing has won the Olympics, it may be content to let this tempest
in a teapot blow over with no further damage done to our already stretched
pocketbooks.
By the way, did you notice how the Chinese convicted an
American professor of spying and then ordered him out of the country with no
jail time? That verdict was also believed to be motivated by a decision to
save face before the international court of public opinion in preparation
for the 2008 games.
Will relations thaw between the two superpowers, Beijing and
Washington?
It looks like Beijing won the Olympics but America may have
bought itself some time.