Just when I thought Western leadership couldn't get crazier

When he was campaigning in 1992, "Bill Clinton liked to criticize the serial failings of trickle-down economics by quoting Hillary. 'My wife tells me,' he would say, 'that the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result.'" I was inexorably reminded of Clinton's point in this regard when I heard about the results of the G8 summit. First, Bush went along with a plan "to double African aid." What are they thinking? So far, every penny spent on Africa in the last 30 years has done nothing more than prop up dictatorships. This strategy may have been a fine one during the Cold War, when the West was simply trying to buy allegiances, but in what rational universe does it exist now? Africa as presently configured is a sinkhole. Without fundamental changes -- none of which the Western nations seem capable of articulating -- this will just be more American tax dollars used to fund murderers. (In this regard, check out this great post at Gee Dubya about the insanity of cash aid to Africa.) The same goes for this agreement made by our insane world leaders: "The leaders promised $3 billion in coming years to build an independent Palestinian State in land occupied by Israel, a step many leaders, including Bush, consider central to any durable peace deal." Pardon me, but haven't they noticed that every penny the West has handed over to the Palestinians in the last decades has gone to build bombs aimed at killing Israelis? The average Palestinian lives in a squalor unmatched even in most of the Arab world. It's fashionable for the Left to blame Israel for this, but it's unclear to me how they square this abysmal standard of living with the billions and billions the West has showered on this Community. The fact is, the money is going to Palestinian dictators and murderers, just as it has for so long gone to African dictators and murderers. I'm not surprised by the usual 7 suspects at the G8 for doing this (Britain, France, Germany, etc.), but I'm just disgusted that George Bush would commit the American people to pay billions of dollars over the next years to thugs, murderers and genocidal maniacs.