Speaking of hiding out at Camp David

In my earlier post I criticized Wimpy for taking a powder to avoid facing the protestors in D.C., which would have rounded out a full week of similar, and stronger, disapproval on his Asian tour.

It began with his highly unpopular stop in the Philippines a week ago today. At that time, I only mentioned it, and should have given more space to the plight of the Filipinos, considering BushCo's hypocritical lip service to the ideal of freedom and liberation.

Amy Kaplan does a nice job here, using the words of my hero Mark Twain, protesting the American "liberation" of the Filipinos.

President Bush, in a speech Saturday before the Philippine Congress, [referred] to our history in that country as a "model" for establishing democracy in Iraq. Alluding to the 1898 Spanish-American War, he said, "America is proud of its part in the great story of the Filipino people. Together our soldiers liberated the Philippines from colonial rule."

...In the years leading up to the Philippine war, Twain, the outspoken vice president of the Anti-Imperialist League, believed that once Spanish rule ended, the Philippines would achieve their independence: "It was not to be a government according to our ideas, but a government that represented the feeling of the majority of the Filipinos, a government according to Filipino ideas."

Instead, the U.S. annexed the Philippines in 1899 and waged a brutal war to enforce its rule across the archipelago. Nearly 5,000 American soldiers died, and historians estimate that 250,000 Filipinos perished — 20,000 were killed in combat and the vast majority died from disease and starvation. The U.S. Army burned villages and fields, massacred civilians and herded the residents of entire provinces into concentration camps....When the Senate conducted hearings in 1902 on atrocities, American soldiers testified about the killing of prisoners and torturing of civilians.

...If the story of democracy in the Philippines is a model for Iraq today, how ironic that the president of the United States, more than 100 years after the end of "hostilities," found it too dangerous to stay the night.