A Bull in China's Chops

"There you go again, Ms. Pelosi." That's right -- the Guru of Gaffe, the Maven of Malaprop, the Avatar of Awkward -- AKA the holder of the highest powerless office in the land -- has, once again, stepped in a diplomatic cow pie by venturing to express an opinion on matters she would be better off staying out of. This time the subject was Tibet, and China's fuddy-duddy insistence that Tibet is, indeed, no more than a province of China, and that the Dalai Lama is a pretender and a fraud, in addition to being a demagogue and rabble-rouser. Let me say at the outset that I am on Ms. Pelosi's side on this one. I consider China's pulverization of Tibet to be among the top ten instances of genocide in the 20th Century. And I also consider the Keystone Kops routine that China is going through to "prepare" for the Summer Olympics to be buffoonery at its best. But I can't help being amused by Ms. Pelosi's laser-like precision when it comes to supporting long-since-lost causes. Call her the anti-Kissinger. The Henry, unlike The Nancy, never got involved in a fight that was not already mostly won -- hence his reputation for diplomatic sophistication and savoir-faire. Truly, there is something to be said for the titanic hypocrisy that "diplomacy" entails. After all, how constructive is it to pick a fight every time something happens that one doesn't like? (I don't know, but you could ask President Bush.) Our well-deserved reputation for meddling and snooping -- trying to be not only the policeman of the world, but also its social worker -- has a lot to do with the high esteem (not!) in which we are held throughout most of the world -- except for a few backwaters like ex-Soviet Georgia, where they can't bring in CNN. When our fearless leader is a hero among a few primitive tribes and mountain brigands, and a villain to everyone else, you kind of have to wonder about the direction our foreign policy is taking. Ms. Pelosi, of course, believes that anything that embarrasses Bush must be a good thing, and that anything that embarrasses his friends must be an even better thing. And, once again, she has a point. The problem is that five minutes after she opens her mouth, she has to do it again -- in order to apologize. I expect this will happen in short order re: China vs. Tibet -- assuming it has not already. But in the meantime, she did do us a service by showing, once again, the Chinese regime to be a bunch of stuffed shirts who have about as much use for human rights as a cat has for fleas. They won the Summer Olympics fair and square, they say -- so why do we also insist that they Disney World-ize themselves in order to keep from upsetting visitors? I say, let China be China. (And -- let Tibet be Tibet. But who's going to listen to that idea?)