A Summary Of Bushco Bungling On “The Dark Continent”

(Note: I will probably continue to have daytime ISP problems with IE and Blogger that will render me unable to post during the day - just an FYI...and I also posted here.)

This is some truly funny revisionist history from Kathryn Jean Lopez (here)…

In the tradition of the Bush administration, Dana Perino has a devotion to the people of Africa.

Sure, just like “in the tradition” of Bushco’s “devotion” to screwing over working families, the unemployed, women seeking family planning services, etc., as noted here.

This, though, does give me an excuse to debunk some more corporate media mythology on how much Number 43 and his pals supposedly paid attention to that continent.

I will grudgingly give Bushco credit for allocating approximately $48 billion for The President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR) in the Hyde/Lantos bill from August of 2008, as noted here. However, I also pointed out that there really wasn’t any good reason to establish PEPFAR instead of contributing to the U.N. Global AIDS Fund, though PEPFAR funding was contingent on what I thought were some pretty idiotic requirements that assumed “abstinence only” behavior by sub-Saharan men, as well as the fact that PEPFAR specified brand drugs and disallowed use of generics in their place.

Also, this tells us that, as of 2006 (most current available information on this), the U.S. “maintained its role as the leading supplier of weapons to the developing world,” including “the genocide in Rwanda (and) the ongoing civil war in the Democratic Republic of the Congo,” as well as what very possibly is our role in “illegal (small arms) deals that have fueled conflicts in Liberia, Sierra Leone (and) Angola (also).”

This story also tells us that, despite the signage of 156 countries including every sub-Saharan African country except Somalia, the U.S. still refuses to sign the international Mine Ban Treaty (I blamed Dubya first for this, but the Obama Administration has now signed onto this wrongheaded policy also).

And no discussion of Bushco and Africa could be complete without noting Samuel Bodman, Bushco’s former energy secretary and head of Cabot Corporation; as noted here, the company was the subject of a report by “a United Nations Panel of Experts…accusing the company, along with several other US corporations, of helping to fuel the wars in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) while (Bodman) ran Cabot by purchasing coltan from Congo during the conflict and illegally plundering the country's vast natural resources (coltan is "a heat resistant powder which has unique properties for storing electrical charge, heavily used for printed circuit boards included in cellphones").

Also, as noted here, Liberia's warlord Charles Taylor is currently facing the war crimes charges that Bushco should have to face one day (shockingly, though, it looks like Dubya and his pals did the right thing by rebuffing Pat Robertson, who lobbied the White House on Taylor's behalf in 2003...Robertson received a 1999 concession to run a gold-mining exploration in southeastern Liberia - interesting financial development for a self-proclaimed "man of God" if I do say so myself).

And all you need to know about the intellectual corruption of Bushco’s foreign policy is that they decided to blow Iraq to smithereens over lies but failed to put “boots in the ground” in Darfur, where a genuine human rights crisis was underway (here).

So in summary, I suppose you could argue that Former President Highest Disapproval Rating In Gallup Poll History and his pals had a “devotion” to Africa, all right, in the same way any real or would-be occupying colonial power had a “devotion” to profit and ruination of a country and its people to the exclusion of any other desired outcome.