After eight years we shouldn't be surprised -- but just when you thought it couldn't get worse, President Bush does it again. He's going to the Olympics so he doesn't offend the Chinese people.
Forget about the Communist regime's crackdown on human rights and labor activists -- he's ready and willing to offend those Chinese citizens. The ones who need his support the most.
And its further proof that Bush could care less about the two million American workers who have suffered the anguish of losing their jobs since China joined the WTO.
Maybe Bush thinks the cheap T-shirts we buy from China make up for job losses and lower living standards.
But the truth is Bush doesn't have a choice. He has to be nice to the Chinese. His policies have made the President of the United States beholden to Chinese capital.
We owe the Chinese too much money -- about $1.5 trillion, according to some estimates. Why? Because of the simple economics that Bush and his cronies don't seem to get - we buy far more than we sell from them and we finance our budget deficit by selling them Treasury bills.
It hasn't always been this way and doesn't have to stay this way. We got here because we've been sold a bunch of phony promises about so-called free trade.
And now we have to watch our commander in chief kiss up to a country that's eating our economic lunch, abusing its workers and jailing human rights activists.
It doesn't have to be that way.
We can make it harder for greedy multinationals to ship American jobs to China.
We can make it harder for our trading partners to pay their workers slave wages and violate human rights.
We can take back tax cuts for the rich so we can begin to balance our budget and stop relying on foreign investment.
Over the past two weeks, John McCain has shown us again why he is running to fulfill Bush's third term.
McCain doesn't give a damn about American workers. He is ready and willing to sell us out with more so-called free trade deals, and he won't even tell us that to our faces.
First, he went to Canada to tout NAFTA. Then, to really prove he doesn't care about shoving it down the throats of every worker, he went to the world capital of anti-worker violence -- Colombia -- to push another trade deal.
There's a pattern developing of kowtowing to foreign leaders while undermining workers in America.
It's undignified and it's un-American.
All the crappy T-shirts in the world won't make up for that.