Bush Folks Can't Catch A Break

They also can't catch a clue. I never understood why Bush selected the big, lumbering, manish looking Karen Hughes to be the undersecretary to improve our image in the Middle East anyway. But, the lies they are telling us here aren't working over there.

'This war is really, really bringing your positive efforts to the level of zero,' said Hidayet Sefkatli Tuksal, an activist with the Capital City Women's Forum. She said it was difficult to talk about cooperation between women in the United States and Turkey as long as Iraq was under occupation.

Hughes, a longtime confidant of President Bush tasked with burnishing the U.S. image overseas, has generally met with polite audiences -- many of whom received U.S. funding or consisted of former exchange students -- during a tour of Egypt, Saudi Arabia and Turkey this week.

In this case the U.S. Embassy asked Kader, an umbrella group that supports woman candidates, to assemble the guest list. None of the activists currently receive U.S. funds and the guests apparently had little desire to mince words. Six of the eight women who spoke at the session, held in Ankara, the capital, focused on the Iraq war.

'War makes the rights of women completely erased and poverty comes after war -- and women pay the price,' said Fatma Nevin Vargun, a Kurdish women's rights activist. Vargun denounced the arrest of Cindy Sheehan, the activist mother of a soldier killed in Iraq, in front of the White House Monday at an antiwar protest.

Hughes, looking increasingly pained, defended the decision to invade Iraq as a difficult and wrenching moment for President Bush, but necessary to protect America.

'You're concerned about war, and no one likes war,' she said. But, she said, 'to preserve the peace sometimes my country believes war is necessary.' She also asserted that women are faring much better in Iraq than under the rule of deposed president Saddam Hussein.

If I hear this lie from conservative lips one more time I am going to scream in blood curdling fashion. Women are afraid to leave the house since the war began and are increasingly becoming the victims of rape and other brutal acts inspired by religious extremism (that wasn't allowed by Saddam).

'War is not necessary for peace,' shot back Feray Salman, a human rights advocate. She said countries should not try to impose democracy through war, adding that 'we can never, ever export democracy and freedom from one country to another.'

Tuksal said she was 'feeling myself wounded, feeling myself insulted here' by Hughes' response. 'In every photograph that comes from Iraq there is that look of fear in the eyes of women and children. . . . This needs to be resolved as soon as possible.'