Scheer Bias: Bush And Faud

I just dread clicking on Robert Scheer columns in Real Clear Politics. I know what I'm in for, and it's never pretty. But it's always easy to shoot him down.

Here he is on Bush and the House of Faud (remember, former president Bush and vice president Cheney just atteneded King Faud's funeral):

THE ONLY EVIDENCE you need that President Bush is losing the "war on terror" is this: On Sunday, the foreign minister of Saudi Arabia said that relations with the United States "couldn't be better." ...

Our president loves to use the word "evil" in his speeches, yet throughout his life he and his family have had deep personal, political and financial ties with a country that represents everything the American Revolution stood against: tyranny, religious intolerance, corrupt royalty and popular ignorance.

The fascination with the Bush-Faud connection always amuses, because what's really at work is the US-Faud connection, as pointed out by even the uber-Leftymag, Mother Jones, which ranked the country #1 in guns for oil, thanks to a certain former president:

The sheikhdom of Saudi Arabia, ruled by King Fahd bin Abd al-Aziz al-Saud, operates without any elected representatives or constitution and has been America's best arms customer during the 1990s.

President Clinton has approved $23.8 billion in licenses and sales to Saudi Arabia since 1993, including some of the most sophisticated weapons the U.S. produces: General Dynamics M1A2 Abrams tanks, McDonnell Douglas F-15 Strike Eagle attack aircraft, and Rockwell GBU-15 smart bombs.

Clinton, like Bush, knew that Faud's kingdom is a necessary evil for anyone who wishes Americans to continue to have employment and food on their table. (Which makes you wonder how Sheer can be anti-ANWR drilling and anti-Faud at the same time.) Had Clinton been more aware of what Saudi Arabia's state-funded Wahabi religion was really up to, we might not have had 9/11.

Bush does understand it exactly, and he's doing the right thing. He's keeping the oil flowing while making it harder and harder for Wahabism and its likes to take hold. It was he who forced the Fauds to hold the first free elections in Saudi Arabia, through his democratization of Iraq. Clinton didn't accomplish anything approaching that, because of his wont to ignore difficult situations and give his attention to interns in thongs.