Zimbabwe Birthday Cake, Chechen Head Bullets: ugly world.

In Zimbabwe, President-for-life Robert Mugabe spent over a hundred thousand dollars on his Birthday party this week. How old are you, Robert, I lost track, is it 85 or 86?  Mugabe supposedly is in a coalition government with Morgan Tsvangirai, but Morgan had enough sense to send his regrets to this absurd event of conspicuous consumption. Over half the people of Zimbabwe are hungry and would have loved a piece of that cake. It's another Marie Antoinette moment, transplanted from 1789 to 2009. The coalitiion government is dead in the water in Zimbabwe, bottom line. Mugabe's long rambling speech argued that the white farmers he chased off their land (that's the root cause of the starvation by the way) need to be happy that he did it, and he is going to probably chase the rest of them off too. The starvation is sure to expand.

In Chechnya, the Russian occupation has found a useful tool in a guy named Ramzan Kadyrov. This "President" (read: bootlicking strongman Russian puppet) explained this week why seven young women found in a ditch with bullets in the back of their heads deserved to die. They had loose morals, clearly, and their male relatives were right to kill them without benefit of a trial. In an apparent effort to shore up his own power, Kadyrov is carrying out a campaign to carry out an "islamic values" campaign. Please find it in the Koran that women who have sex without marriage need to be executed while the male partners are let off scot free. In reality, Kadyrov is slandering the young women by accusing them of prostitution, when there is no evidence of that. More likely, some Islamic terror splinter group went out and found seven women who were not wearing head scarves.

The lesson for USA policymakers in this is, do we want to participate in this process in Pakistan and Afghanistan, by indicating willingness to toss the women to the wolves in order to pacify conservative Islamic tribes? What the islamic world needs, in order to start the long walk to modernity, is to empower and respect the female half o their population. Instead, for cultural reasons, they respond to a fear of modernity by clinging to the past by keeping their women in ignorance and virtual slavery.

The fact that Rush Limbaugh has apparently taken over the Republican Party this week has been discouraging to me, but at least I can take a glance at some of the less fortunate portions of our planet and realize how lucky my wife and daughters are. There is probably nothing we can do to help the Chechens. As regards Zimbabwe, we need to work harder at deposing Mugabe.