1115.org

(1)
The hapless Raghubir Goyal, who is always being asked: “What’s your question, Goyal?”, asked La Perino on Tuesday about the U.S. reaction to the recent protests and crackdown in Burma. La Perino gave what I regard as a really strange answer:

Q Second, on Burma. As far as the situation in Burma is concerned, it’s not the first time this general, or dictator, in Burma — in 1988 also he killed 3,000 innocent democratic people there — democracy there. Now each time he does that, and then after killing scores of people and putting thousands in prison, and then everything is quiet and nobody talks about — after 15 years.

MS. PERINO: What’s your question, Goyal?

Q So where do we stand on this? And we’ll continue like this, like innocent people will get killed, and then we’ll just keep quiet after –

MS. PERINO: The President and Mrs. Bush feel very strongly that there should be an immediate move to a peaceful transition to democracy in Burma. And we are calling for an immediate return of U.N. Envoy Gambari to Burma in order to start to forge that peace.

The question is clearly: What is the position of the U.S. government?

What’s with the “President and Mrs. Bush feel very strongly…” reply? The Bush government doesn’t have a position, only the Bush family does?

Now here’s where it gets weird. This isn’t just a case of Perino making the most asinine reply possible to a totally innocuous question. This is how she opened her October 2 press conference:

Good afternoon. I have a statement on Burma, before taking your questions.

The President and Mrs. Bush remain concerned about the reports of violence and intimidation that continue to come out of Burma. The United States is pleased that U.N. Special Envoy Gambari was able to see Aung San Suu Kyi. Mr. Gambari remains in Burma in order to see the top junta leader, Than Shwe.

And then again on October 5:

Q All right. The other thing I wanted to ask, on Burma, a number of members of the exiled committee in the United States were quoted over the weekend as recalling in 1990, when the military had its last crackdown, how President Bush’s father said he was monitoring the situation closely, and they had all kinds of hopes that he would break off diplomatic recognition with Burma and send a message. Given the recent developments there, is the administration considering ending diplomatic relations with Burma?

MS. PERINO: Well, what we are considering is any further steps, whether it be additional sanctions or other types of actions, and it would be premature for me to announce those from here. Those discussions are underway. We are paying very close attention to it. The President and Mrs. Bush are very concerned, and I can tell you that they’re very interested.

Talk about sticking to the script! So this is our carefully considered diplomatic response to the crackdown in Burma. Concern will be expressed only by the President and Mrs. Bush, not by the U.S. government. But, wait, it gets worse. Her very next sentence was:

They’re also — they’re calling on Mr. Gambari to go back immediately so that he can meet with Aung San Suu Kyi and the junta to try to get them on the path to a peaceful transition to democracy. Then in the meantime, we are considering what other steps we can do in the federal government.

The President and Mrs. Bush are calling on Mr. Gambari, not the U.S. government. Don’t that beat all!

Whose is the invisible hand behind this strategy? Could this be yet another case of “Condi Rice, Ph.D., strikes again”?

(2)
I really don’t know what to make of the fact that Laura Bush wrote an editorial in yesterday’s WSJ about Burma.

She is obviously an instrument of administration strategy when it comes to Burma. What that strategy may be is far from clear. Obviously, we want to say something to Burma, but we don’t want it to have the force it would have if it came from the President’s mouth, or the Secretary of State’s. Does it have any force at all when it comes from the mouth of the first lady? Does our Burma strategy consist of just posturing? We want to pretend to say something to Burma?

Laura Bush, who rarely speaks about U.S. policy outside her pet causes of literacy and children’s education, has taken an active role in speaking in support of Myanmar’s democracy activists, saying she wants protesters to know the American people are with them.

The American people, but not the American government?

George Bush certainly isn’t shedding much light here:

Asked out (sic) his wife’s newspaper commentary after delivering remarks on a terrorist surveillance bill being debated in the House, President Bush gave a thumbs up sign to reporters.

(3)
Purely as an aside, could it be possible that when President Bush says we do not torture people, he means “me and the missus”?

(4)
Stand by for another statement from President and Mrs. B; I feel one coming on:

Hundreds of Buddhist monks rounded up by Myanmar’s junta were beaten and kept in animal-like conditions without toilets or drinking water during days of interrogation, one of those freed said on Thursday.
[…]
Caged for more than a week at a former Government Technical Institute compound in north Yangon, the monks — revered figures in the devoutly Buddhist nation — were stripped of their maroon monastic robes and treated like common criminals.

“When one of us used a pronoun referring to himself as a monk, he was slapped,” the monk said. “Then an interrogator said: ‘You are no longer a monk. You are just an ordinary man with a shaven head.’”

It seems that while priests are defrocked (metaphorically), monks are disrobed (literally).