Just another word for nothin' left to lose

President George W. Bush with Kazakhstan President Nursultan Nazarbayev in the Rose Garden at the White House, Friday, Sept. 29, 2006, following their meeting in the Oval Office. White House photo by Eric Draper.

This comment by our commander-in-chief caught your blogstress's delicate ear earlier this week, but being an easily distracted, prone-to-the-vapors sort of gal, your blogstress must concede that la tête de t'écrivaine was set spinning by the scandal, murder and mayhem that has besieged our benighted nation over the course of the last few days. What momentarily drew your Webwench's attention to the mystical realm of foreign policy was the president's description of Kazakhstan as "a free country." This he said with the dictator of that oil-rich Central Asian nation by his side -- Nursultan Nazarbayev, the dictator who has ruled the Kazakh people with an iron fist since before the republic gained independence in the disintegration of the Soviet Union.

Thankfully, Ted Rall served up this thoughtful piece:

Bush Gives 15 Million Muslims More Reasons to Hate Us

SEATTLE--George W. Bush says lots of nice things about President Nursultan Nazarbayev. On September 29 he portrayed the leader of Kazakhstan, who came to Washington for a state luncheon, as a "steadfast partner in the international war on terrorism." Nazarbayev, according to Bush and U.S. state-controlled media, is leading a transition to democracy and liberalizing his nation's economy. He's been lauded for privatizing old Soviet-era state industries and inviting foreign companies to invest in the exploitation of what may be the world's largest untapped oil reserves. Kazakhstan, Bush says, "now is a free nation."

Of course, given the Mr. Bush's standards, Kazakhstan might just qualify as "a free nation," in much the same way as the U.S. is "a free nation."

Oh, sure, we have a bit more in the way of freedom than the Kazakh people. Note that President Nazarbayev apparently resorted to ballot-stuffing for his widely-discredited 2005 electoral victory. President Bush, on the other hand, had to repress the vote in one critical state -- Ohio -- in order to win re-election. (What Allah giveth Nazarbayev, the Lord taketh away from President Bush, with remarkably similar results.)

Should anything good come out of the Mark Foley scandal, it will hopefully be the repeal of the awful law passed last week by Congress that suspends the right of habeas corpus and shields the Bush administration from war crimes prosecutions. If the Dems get the House, that should be the first order of business, along with the immediate suspension of the NSA domestic spying program and the dreadful "compromise" Congress made with the White House -- the one that will make it impossible to know what the executive branch is up to when it peaks under the covers of American citizens.

CLICK HERE TO READ ALL OF RALL'S ESSAY