George W. Bush is completely right.

[Big Ol' Smitty]

On Burma.

 

A dusk-to-dawn curfew in the Burmese cities of Rangoon and Mandalay has been announced by the ruling military junta in response to the biggest demonstrations against military rule in nearly 20 years.

 

Troops and police armed with rifles surrounded the Sule Pagoda in Yangon, the focus of two days of mass demonstrations led by thousands of maroon-robed monks.

 

Earlier, George W Bush announced new sanctions against Burma's leaders and called on the international community to help end the country's "19-year reign of fear".

 

In a speech to the United Nations, the US president said: "The United States will tighten economic sanctions on the leaders of the regime and their financial backers.

 

"We will impose an expanded visa ban on those responsible for the most egregious violations of human rights, as well as their family members.

 

"The ruling junta remains unyielding, yet the people's desire for freedom is unmistakable."

 

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml...5/wburma425.xml

[At Home]

George Bush is just in cahoots with the protestors to overthrow the government there because they want to build WMDs.

 

 

Yeah, well sometimes politicians get it right. It's just one of the fish in the sea though, so it'll get overlooked.

[CanadianChris]

On the main page, this comes up as "George W. Bush is completely r..." I certainly didn't fill in the r... with "right."

[bobobrazil1984]

since when does Bush think economic sanctions are a good strategy for dealing with dictator and dictator-like corrupt regimes who do human rights violations?

[EricMM]

since they're not in the oil rich part of the world middle east...

[Dobbs 3K]

since when does Bush think economic sanctions are a good strategy for dealing with dictator and dictator-like corrupt regimes who do human rights violations?

 

Well, it's worked with Cuba.

 

Oh, wait...

 

Myanmar is a messed up country. Maybe the UN or someone in that part of the world could step in and actually do something about it? Life is cheap in countries like China and India, so I doubt they really care, though.

[SamoaRowe]

Yeah, I thought this title was going to be "George W. Bush is completely retarded." I'd have an easier time believing that than I do believing he actually made a good decision without it being accidental.

[Ginger Snaps]

since they're not in the oil rich part of the world middle east...

 

Burma's not full of black people like Darfur so I don't see your side eager to go help out the Burmese either

[snuffbox]

Not a particularly well-planned 'comeback' there.

[EricMM]

Yeah, we're such dickholes for trying to help out in Darfur..?

[Guest Tzar Lysergic]

There's a bunch of Burmese refugees working where I am right now. Interesting folk. Smell like garlic and chewing tobacco, and they're all named Aung or Maung.

 

I talked at great length to one I can understand about the situation back home, and it's pretty nasty. Crumbling infrastructure, bad wages, bad health care. A couple members of his extended family are political prisoners. Fucked up. They've actually had a democratic parliament for almost 20 years now, but the military doesn't allow them to meet, and keeps the elected leader whose name escapes me under various states of imprisonment or house arrest.

[EricMM]

Burmese food is fucking fantastic, by the way.

 

If you can find it in your area, I would recommend it.

 

Anyone in my area should check out Mandalay in downtown Silver Spring.

 

Baller

 

Just don't try to pronounce the names. You'll see how familiar and usual Chinese is in comparison.

[Guest Tzar Lysergic]

^No jive. Dude split some meat n rice thing with me, and it was fuckin' swell.

[Big Ol' Smitty]

I am telling as many people as I can to boycott Chevron Oil, who is in dick deep with the junta in Burma. So please stop filling up at Chevron stations!

[Guest Gym Class Fallout]

Any other regional subsidiaries we should know about? I don't think Chevron has a foothold here; it's mostly BP (formerly Amoco), Mobil, Citgo, and Shell.

[Big Ol' Smitty]

76, I'm pretty sure.

[Big Ol' Smitty]

More on Burma, from the German magazine Spiegel. This is fucking fascism, folks:

 

[Troops] surrounded a monastery on Weiza Yandar Street. All the roughly 200 monks living there were forced to stand in a row and the security forces beat their heads against a brick wall. When they were all covered in blood and lay moaning on the ground, they were thrown into a truck and taken away. "We are crying for our monks," said the man, and then he was gone.

 

From the New York Times:

 

Embarrassed by smuggled video and photographs that showed their people rising up against them, the generals who run Myanmar simply switched off the Internet.

 

Until Friday television screens and newspapers abroad were flooded with scenes of tens of thousands of red-robed monks in the streets and of chaos and violence as the junta stamped out the biggest popular uprising there in two decades.

 

But then the images, text messages and postings stopped, shut down by generals who belatedly grasped the power of the Internet to jeopardize their crackdown.

 

"Finally they realized that this was their biggest enemy, and they took it down," said Aung Zaw, editor of an exile magazine based in Thailand called The Irrawaddy, whose Web site has been a leading source of information in recent weeks.

[Big Ol' Smitty]

since they're not in the oil rich part of the world middle east...

 

Burma's not full of black people like Darfur so I don't see your side eager to go help out the Burmese either

 

What the fuck did this even mean?

[snuffbox]

Best defense for focusing everything on Iraq rather than anything on stuff like this/Darfur/Katrina/etc he could think of.

[Dobbs 3K]

Yeah, but like I suggested before, shouldn't other countries be getting outraged about this as well?

 

I think the key problems are that the UN is dominated by Arab and Third World countries that are just as bad in some ways as Myanmar, and the fact that the local super-power, China, has a regime that is equally despicable. Thus, it would be up to Uncle Sam to get anything done yet again, but we're too busy with two wars right now, so the world will sit idly by while monks are rounded up.