Bush 41 and Clinton to shill for private donations

One the face of it, I was pleasantly surprised by this move. It is certainly something that, if done right, could yield a lot of aid and reconstruction money for those unfortunate countries.

However, after the first blush, it has been hard for me to control my cynicism about all this... for one, it doesn't answer some of the original questions such as why didn't Dubya take a break from "clearing brush" to make some appearances regarding the tsunami until 3 days after it hit? And despite his empathetic performances in the days following 9/11, why did he scorn this chance to do the same? (More on that later in the post) It's not like it didn't affect us; as many as 5000 Americans might be missing, more than died on 9/11.

Additionally, the paltry nature of our original pledges (as well as our aid to the world in general as spotlighted by Jan the UN Man) is still embarassing, although this lessens the political sting to the Bushies (and the actual hurt to the victims if done properly...)

The original pledge in and of itself highlights one of the biggest reasons Bush was essentially forced to come up with something like this in the face of all the political heat: due to our massive deficits, the government couldn't do it. Buried at the end of their story, CNN says:

Private donations may alleviate pressure on the U.S. government -- which faces its largest deficit -- to contribute more money.

I think that's one of the central issues here... and as unseemly as it is to be reminding people during such a tragedy of the fact that this situation is one he put the country in, I think it would be more unseemly for folks to forget it. (The Right doesn't have any damn room to talk on that score anyway... they turned the 9/11 site into a friggin' campaign commercial)

I don't know... perhaps I am being too harsh. I guess I just think that while this will hopefully help out a lot of folks, I don't think the decision was made because it was the right or even best thing to do... rather it was because he was obscenely slow to act and stingy at crunch time, and he needs something to deflect criticism and questioning of his "God's Boy" act. But does that matter so much? The main thing is that people in the region should get a boost, and if it took a load of criticism to get it, so be it. This is one of the first times that I have honestly been in a position where I have had to question the patentcy of my wall between pure judgement of policy and pure judgement of this administration and the right in general, so I will have to see where my reflections take me.

Anyway, I said I wanted to come back to the administration's scorn for empathetic performances, and I will do so now by asking this question: Is there anyone bigger than Bill Clinton in all of this? The Bush team makes no secret of loathing Bubba in general, but remember that in this specific case, they also sniped at him about empathisizing with folks in tragedies (as if it was a bad thing). Yet Clinton stepped up to the plate in order to help the victims of the tsunami, despite the comments and despite being used as a political shield...