One-and-a-Half Cheers for The President

Way to go, W. This is a good start. Liberals should applaud it and Bush should keep doing it.

The crucially disappointing fact here, however, is that he is basically only inviting dissidents from countries that count as our political foes. My suspicion about conservatives is that they have a tendency to use human rights as a stalking horse for the pursuit of mere national interest. Liberals are more likely to take human rights as an end in themselves. We should encourage the President to keep having these meetings. But they also provide us with tests of his real motives. If he keeps formulating the guest lists in this way, it will tend to confirm my suspicion about his motives. If he widens the lists to include those from our evil allies (e.g. Uzbekistan), then this will tend to disconfirm my suspicions.