Hey everybody, just keep yammering away about real issues like those pesky Swift Boat Vets while people in Darfur continue to die

My Genocide Watch counter has completed its first month. Not that I'm surprised about the Bush half of the story, though I am still disappointed that the European Union will not admit that genocide is happening in Darfur, thus making people like Republican Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist look exponentially more progressive than his European counterparts because at least he's got the balls to travel to Darfur and declare that genocide is happening.

If a hardline US Republican can look more progressive than European leaders, what is this world coming to? In fact, what has the progressive community come to? And what has the story about Sudan come to? Nobody's talking about it anymore.

Before updating Genocide Watch, I search Google News for "bush genocide". A couple weeks ago, when the Darfur stoy finally seemed to grow a pair of legs and media coverage increased, I'd receive a plethora of links about the crisis, all of them published that day. Now I receive 2-5 stories. Worse yet, there's hardly any Sudan coverage in the blogosphere. I'll admit that I've been slacking and I haven't kep up on the story everyday, but that's partly because I haven't seen anything about the story on a daily basis. When I sit down to do my news reading, I hit my Bloglines subscriptions first, and usually spend a few hours pouring over them. This is where I get the majority of my news from. And I try to be as diverse as possible; I monitor multiple international feeds, news blogs from Atrios to Instapundit, US news feeds, multiple feeds showing popular links from the blogosphere, etc. And as far as I can tell, nobody is blogging about this story.

I did a search for "Darfur" on all my Bloglines feeds. The results were pretty poor. There are a couple recent stories from the BBC, but the last mention of it in the blogosphere was by Instapundit in 8/18. As you all know, I just loooove Glenn Reynolds, so I'm going to have to swallow my pride and give credit where credit's due here: at least he's blogging about it. The last links regarding Darfur I could find from any progressive blogs in my Bloglines feeds were by Echidne of the Snakes on 8/11, and feministe on 8/7. That last one hardly counts because I authored that post!

Does everybody just not care? Where are the other A-list bloggers besides Instapundit? Kevin Drum did a piece on Darfur a while back, but that's all I can remember. The progressive blog community is pretty much silent on genocide, and I'm left giving props to Sen. Bill Frist and Instapundit. For the past month, it's been Kerry vs. the Swift Boat Vets, 24/7, like this story even fucking matters. Like it's an issue. I mean, honestly, do you give a shit? I certainly don't. There's a lot of people who just wish this story would die. If you ask me, the lack of focus on this crisis by the people who are supposed to care about world issues is pretty despicable. I've been monitoring the stories, I've been writing letters to the editor, and I've even donated to the cause. How about the rest of you? There's more to life then this years election, you know.

And just in case you're interested, here's a little news. Sudanese President Omar al-Bashir shitcanned Salafeddine Saleh, head of the humanitarian commission affiliated with the Sudanese Ministry of Humanitarian Affairs. And why?

Saleh said at a lecture in Khartoum last week he advised the government to settle the crisis in Darfur through dialogue, but his suggestion was rejected.

"The situation in Darfur is tragic and should be settled peacefully, but the political leadership refused (to listen)and insisted on a military solution," Saleh was quoted as telling the audience.

God forbid anybody in Khartoum support a peaceful solution. Reading stories like this don't give me much hope for the African Union's peace talks in Nigeria, where the Sudanese government continues to claim that they'll disarm the Janjaweed rebels (with whom they are in bed with and haven't yet lifted a finger towards disarming them), while again rejecting the AU's offer for peacekeepers to be deployed in Darfur.

Airlifts of food have been continuing. Unfortuately, it seems that this is now the only way to get food the the refugees. If they world hadn't waited so long to deliver aid, we could have used the roads before the rain season came. Now the riverbeds are filled wih water, making many roads impassable. This is a huge problem:

A UN spokesman said the number of internally displaced people in the Darfur region had increased to 1.2 million, from the one million reported last month.

In addition, there are 270,000 people in need of humanitarian assistance, "bringing the total number of conflict-affected people in Darfur to a staggering 1.48 million people," Radhia Achouri said.

In the meantime, the Sudanese government has only proven that they are a bunch of liars who don't keep their promises, which is why I'm not holding out hope for the peace talks in Nigeria. It doesn't mean I won't keep my fingers crossed, but the world community better know what to do the next time Khartoum stabs them in the back.