NPR reported that Bush is visiting Africa, where villager are struggling with malaria. About time.

I know that we have had a loose relationship with Africa, what with our pesky slaveholder past and all, but some day we really need to figure out the net cost or net benefit of a weak or strong Africa, respectively. We know that we have strategic interests in the Middle East (oily ones) but there is paltry reason to be in Africa other than "it's the right thing to do." What galls me about that reasoning is that our intervention in Afghanistan should have started when the women began being brutalized by the Taliban some 5 or 8 years before the Attacks of September Eleventh. It didn't.

Africa has been a history of greed and excess, first of the Europeans and then of the effected Africans. We can help them shape their future, but we have to buck up first and eat our Wheaties. It's going to take a while.

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