Posted on 11/17/2001 2:38:53 AM PST by JohnHuang2
With radio address, first lady's role grows
BY RON HUTCHESON
Herald Washington Bureau
CRAWFORD, Texas -- First lady Laura Bush will deliver Saturday's weekly White House radio address to kick off an international campaign highlighting the Taliban's mistreatment of Afghan women.
The radio address, the first by a first lady, is the latest example of Laura Bush's increasingly public role in her husband's presidency.
She will urge worldwide condemnation of Taliban policies that block women from jobs and education. The Bush administration has latched onto the treatment of women as a dramatic way to cast the war on terrorism as a conflict between good and evil -- not a war against Islam -- and is deploying the first lady to dramatize the message.
Human rights groups have long complained that the Taliban is one of the most repressive regimes in the world for women. The Islamic government banned schooling for girls older than 8 and barred women from most jobs. Women also are banned from the best hospitals under policies encouraging segregation of men and women. And women are required to be covered head-to-toe when they leave their homes.
Women who violate the strict standards of conduct are summarily beaten by morality police from the ``Department for the Propagation of Virtue and the Suppression of Vice.''
Refugees report that women caught with painted nails have had them ripped out by the morality police.
A 1999 report from Physicians for Human Rights, a Boston-based group, said this of the Taliban: ``To our knowledge, no other regime in the world has methodically and violently forced half of its population into virtual house arrest, prohibiting them on pain of physical punishment from showing their faces, seeking medical care without a male escort, or attending school.''
The group concluded that Taliban policies ``have had a disastrous impact'' on women, forcing thousands of single women and widows into poverty.
Laura Bush's radio address will be the first by a president's wife, although others have participated in joint broadcasts with their husbands. The State Department will seek to buttress her remarks by posting a report on The Taliban's War Against Women on the agency's website, www.state.gov.
On Monday, Cherie Blair, wife of British Prime Minister Tony Blair, will discuss the issue in London with top women in the British government.
Laura Bush's involvement is another indication of her evolving role as first lady. A former librarian and teacher who made her husband promise during their courtship that she would not have to make speeches, she had hoped to make education her signature issue.
But following the Sept. 11 attacks she increasingly has helped voice the administration's views.
This week she also dabbled in diplomacy by overseeing arrangements for Russian President Vladimir Putin and his wife, Luydmila, during their two-day visit to the Bush ranch near Crawford.
Kabul Vice? I can already see Crockett trading in his Ferrari for a donkey.
BIG TIME!
Well, that really worked didn't it?!(/sarcasm)
Or how about this one...KABUL (AFP), Dec 14: The Taliban have invited Hillary Clinton to visit Afghanistan to find out the truth about rights for women in the war-torn country, official sources said on Tuesday. A foreign ministry statement run by official Radio Shariat said the US First Lady could come to Afghanistan and talk with local women to see for herself that there are no women rights violations in the Taliban areas.
"We invite Mrs Clinton to visit Afghanistan and to closely talk with Afghan women on women rights in order to get familiar with the realities of the Afghan society and to be convinced that women rights are being observed here as never before," the statement said.
ROFLOL! Well, Hillary, why didn't you go?! ROFLOL!
Keep up the good work. It's been said here in an earlier post 'what a difference' class,honesty,genuine patriotism can do for this country.
To show the world what it really means to be an American.
No puppet show here.
Thank you.
ROFLOL! Well, Hillary, why didn't you go?! ROFLOL!
Because she was too interested in stripping the White House and listing her name in the registry at an expensive store to worry about women not getting medical care, etc.
And Stay There!!!
I am sure she thought to herself - "Why didn't I do that?"
Poor Hillary
And Stay There!!!
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