Happy Independence Day! Bush at the Olympics! Screw You, Tibet!

So Bush will attend the Olympic ceremonies and Tibet can suck hind teat, despite the empty wind rhetoric from all sides about human rights and hypocrisy. What puzzles me is that anyone (especially you, Dana Rohrabacher) can express surprise about this.

The merchants that run this country have shown an ability to swallow anything, gnats, camels, even slavery and genocide if there's money to be made. We celebrate the 4th of July and tell our children it had something to do with tea and taxes on playing cards, when in fact a bigger issue was George III's decree to keep settlers out of Indian lands and England's growing discomfort with slavery. "How is it that we hear the loudest yelps for liberty among the drivers of negroes?" Dr. Johnson asked. The Indians and Africans were more thoroughly screwed than the Tibetans (who, if DNA is to be believed, are direct cousins of the Native Americans), and that crime is treated with mild regret, like tearing down a historic building for another parking lot. A character in Jim Harrison's novel The Road Home comments on the poverty of the Indians, "You only give reparations or rebuild in the economies of the like-minded as in the case of Germany or Japan."
In spite of the best efforts of the Constitution, this is a mercantile empire, with talk about the Four Freedoms saved for Sundays and Holidays, and success in money-making the primary measure of reality. We will go along to get along with the Chinese, and deplore the situation in Tibet from a safe distance.