 
Associated Press and Reuters photos (of Laura Bush)
Picture fun! Above are pictures of Laura Bush visiting the Western Wall in Jerusalem today and Satan as depicted in Mel Gibson's sick and twisted movie "The Passion of the Christ." Can you tell which is which?
Stepford Wife's visit to 'emotional' sand monkeys
somehow fails to bring peace in the Middle East
Laura Bush's Rainbow Tour of the Middle East isn't going so well.
Everywhere she goes, it seems, at least some of the natives want to kick her head down the street like a soccer ball.
Gee, why didn't Laura get a better reception than she did? You'd think that sending the Stepford Wife from the White House -- the woman who, apparently, is supposed to represent George W. Bush's softer, kinder and gentler side -- to the Middle East would make the sand monkeys love us Americans again. After all, freedom and democracy are our No. 1 export.
But Laura must have gotten some coaching from Karl Rove, because her remarks about her reception indicate that it isn't about how much people hate her fucking guts -- as the wife of the tyrant who is responsible for the unnecessary deaths of thousands of innocent Muslims (and the whole torture thing, too) -- but that it's about how "emotional" those touchy, ungrateful little sand monkeys are.
Reports Reuters:
JERUSALEM -- Protesters jostled and harangued U.S. first lady Laura Bush [today] when she visited a flashpoint Jerusalem shrine holy to both Muslims and Jews and at the heart of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
Israeli police and U.S. Secret Service agents formed a tight cordon around her to push back crowds in what for Bush, on a Middle East goodwill tour, was a rare close encounter with hostile demonstrators.
A small crowd of about two dozen people pressed in on Bush as she entered the Dome of the Rock mosque in Jerusalem's walled Old City. A Palestinian worshipper cried out at her: "You are not welcome here. Why are you hassling our Muslims? How dare you come in here?"
Bush, who made an appeal for peace later, did not respond to him or an old woman inside the mosque who shouted "Koran, Koran" at her in Arabic.
Bush, dressed in a black pantsuit, with black headscarf donned in religious respect and held tightly on her head, exited with police linking arms around her to ward off onlookers.
She began a Middle East trip on Friday acknowledging that the U.S. image in the Muslim world had been badly damaged by a prisoner abuse scandal and a magazine report, since retracted, that U.S. interrogators desecrated the Koran.
Shortly before visiting the mosque, Bush appeared at the adjacent ancient Western Wall and was confronted by dozens of nationalist Jews demanding Washington free convicted Israeli spy Jonathan Pollard. They shouted and waved placards.
...The disturbances during [Laura Bush's] trip to the Jerusalem holy site showed "what an emotional place this is as we go from each one of these very, very holy spots to the next," [she] said later during a stop in the West Bank oasis town of Jericho.
...The shrine compound visited by Bush is known to Muslims as al-Haram al-Sharif ("Noble Sanctuary") and Jews as Temple Mount and has been a frequent venue of violence rooted in conflicting Israeli and Palestinian claims to sovereignty over the site.
It is the most sacred site for Jews, the spot where biblical King Solomon built a temple and where a second temple was razed by the Romans, except for its Western Wall. It is Islam's third holiest site, home to the Dome of the Rock and al-Aqsa mosques.
Laura Bush's spokeswoman Susan Whitson played down the tense scene at the Dome of the Rock. "She completely understood what she was coming into," Whitson said.
...[Bush's] stops [today] were the first time on her five-day trip, which has so far taken her to the Jordanian capital Amman and the Dead Sea, that she faced protesters.
...Israel captured Arab East Jerusalem, including the Old City, along with the West Bank and Gaza in the 1967 Middle East war. Palestinians want all three areas for a future state.
I love Laura Bush's spokeswoman's bullshit comment, which is like someone saying "I meant to do that" after having fallen on his ass.
Here is the Associated Press' coverage of Laura's Rainbow Tour of the Middle East:
JERUSALEM -- Protesters besieged Laura Bush during her visit [today] to two of Jerusalem's most sacred sites, with Israeli police locking arms to restrain the crowd and Secret Service agents packed tightly around America's first lady.
Stepping into the long-running Mideast conflict, she appealed for Israelis and Palestinians to commit to working for peace and said Americans "will do what they can in this process."
The demonstrations at the Western Wall and the Dome of the Rock showed "what an emotional place this is as we go from each one of these very, very holy sites to the next," Mrs. Bush said later in the West Bank town of Jericho as she stood at the ruins of the 8th-century Hisham's Palace.
...Mrs. Bush, who is on a tour intended partly to help defuse anti-American sentiment in the region, placed a note in the Western Wall, Judaism's holiest shrine.... Dozens of protesters stood nearby, shouting, "Free Pollard now." Jonathan Pollard, an American Jew who is serving life sentence in a U.S. prison for spying for Israel, was a civilian intelligence analyst for the U.S. Navy.
The first lady was mobbed by protesters and local reporters, and Secret Service agents and Israeli police had to physically hold back the crowd as she approached the wall.
She then went to the Dome of the Rock, a mosque on a hilltop compound known to Muslims as Haram as-Sharif and to Jews as Temple Mount. As she left the mosque, one heckler yelled, "How dare you come in here?" and "Why do you hassle our Muslims?"
Mrs. Bush removed her shoes as she entered the mosque and walked barefoot on the red carpet. She held a black scarf tightly around her head as she gazed up at the gilded dome and the colorful mosaics on the marble walls.
Some of the women studying inside the mosque were clearly annoyed at the intrusion and waved their fingers at the U.S. entourage. Despite the chaos at both sites, Mrs. Bush kept smiling and said little.
In Jericho, which is under Palestinian control, security was tight and no protesters were evident when Mrs. Bush visited the ruins and met at a hotel with leading Palestinian women.
"As you can tell from our day here, this is a place of emotions everywhere we went, from the Dome of the Rock to the Western Wall" she told reporters at the palace ruins.
...Anti-American sentiment is running high in the Mideast because of a variety of factors, including a now-retracted report in Newsweek that Pentagon investigators had found evidence interrogators at the U.S. Navy base at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, placed copies of the Koran, the Muslim holy book, in washrooms to unsettle suspects and flushed a Koran down a toilet.
"We in principle don't reject anyone's visit to the Al Aqsa Mosque (compound), but we see in the visit of Mrs. Bush an attempt to whitewash the face of the United States, after the crimes that the American interrogators had committed when they desecrated the Koran," the militant Islamic Hamas group said in a statement on its Web site.
Adnan Husseini, director of the Islamic Trust that administers the mosque compound, said Mrs. Bush tried to play down the heckling, saying it could have happened anywhere....
That last paragraph -- and the reports in both news stories that Laura Bush, when heckled, simply pretended that her hecklers didn't even exist -- really makes one wonder: Do the members of the Bush regime truly not realize how much they are hated at home and around the world? Are they in that much denial? Do they simply block out all messages of opposition? Or is their playing down of how much people at home and around the world would like to see all of them hang for the death and destruction and the pain and suffering that they have wreaked upon the world for their own personal gain part of their public-relations offensive?
Laura Bush is lecturing on peace during her Rainbow Tour of the Middle East. A Bush lecturing anyone on peace... (Her peace lectures are so nauseatingly hypocritical and are such disingenuous bullshit that I deleted them from the news stories above -- you can click on the links to the full stories if you want to read them and get queasy.)
10:17:52 AM 
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