Very true. And I agree with you. But I find it very telling that America kept referring to the crew of the plane as “hostages”, while every other country’s media referred to them as “spies.” If we were up to sneaky-sneaky business, the least we could do is apologize. I dunno… Maybe I been living outside of the country too long. My patriotic fervor has been tempered by seeing how arrogant and pushy we look to the rest of the world.

*sigh* At any rate, the real point of my blogging all that was just to work in a jab at Bush, of course. Regardless of whether he should say “sorry” or not, you got to admit he really handled that sloppily. Somebody *died* in the accident, and making pointless threats that “relations will be damaged” doesn’t help the situation. He (and by extension, the U.S.) came off as looking callous and condescending. If a Chinese spy plane had crashed in *our* country – regardless of who caused the accident – do you think *our* only demand would have been an apology?