Left I on the News

Of course he didn't know he was doing so. Bush delivered a paean to the benefits of literacy in a speech today, talking about its benefits to the economy, and also this:

It is very hard to have free societies if the citizens cannot read. Think about that. It's much harder for a society to realize the universal blessings of liberty if your citizens can't read the newspaper in order to be able to make informed choices and decisions about what may be taking place in a country.

I wonder if he knows that the most successful literacy program ever in the history of the world was conducted in Cuba? I wonder if he's noticed that one of the characteristics of modern socialist or socialist-oriented revolutions -- Cuba, Nicaragua, Venezuela -- is precisely that they can only succeed by involving the people, and hence one of their first priorities, if not the first, has been conducting literacy programs? I wonder if he's aware that not only did Cuba pioneer the use of such ambitious literacy programs, and has received many awards for them, but that just a few months ago it received a U.N. award for "exporting" its literacy program to other countries?

While I'm skimming (not thoroughly reading, sorry, can't do that) Bush's speech, I did take note of these obnoxious words:

We don't believe freedom belongs only to the United States of America; we believe that liberty is universal in its applications.

I wonder what the British, and the Swedes, and the Australians, and the Canadians, and the Japanese, and indeed the citizens of most other countries of the world, would think about the fact the George Bush actually thinks there are people who think that "freedom belongs only to the United States of America." What an ass.