Would that be Prince "Bandar Bush",as he was affectionately known in Crawford and Kennebunkport? The same Bandar who donated $1M to the George H.W. Bush Presidential Library and Museum and a $1M C.M. Russell painting to the George W. Bush White House,for eventual display in a George W. Bush presidential library?That Bandar?
For the life of me,I can't imagine why the administration was so resistant to congressional efforts to investigate 9-11,or what might be in the 28 pages of the 'independent' 9-11 Commission report that were censored by the White House.

No, see, remember it was all the Iraqis and Saddam Hussein. Psshh. All these facts. Don't let them bother you. Iraqis. Iraqis. Iraqis. See, now you can be a Republican too. It's easy, just listen to what they tell you and don't think.

A riddle for you. If the Bushes and Cheneys go to Saudi Arabia for a little R & R (visiting family so to speaK), and Laura Bush got a lift from Dick to go shopping (because Laura isn't allowed to drive there), does she get 200 lashes?

And if Mary Cheney went along, does she get stoned for being gay?

I think this comes under the heading of "the enemy of my enemy is my friend." I don't care much for them either, but they are a means to an end. Kind of like the Russian Intelligance agent that supported MLK all those years and saw Jesse as the next "great black leader".

Except this one is a little more like "the extortionist of my friend is someone for whom I'll take it up the ass with a smile so long as I can make a few bucks",Jethro.
I've never been able to understand that "end justifies the means" moral relativism that conservatives seem to believe in.

So you support the Jimmy Carter, "bury my head in the sand and hope they go away" approach?

Jethro,we obviously differ in my being capable of independent thought as opposed to regurgitating the last thing I heard some radio talking head bluster,as well as my not seeing the world in the binary terms favored by elementary school children(and our president),therefore I don't know what the hell "bury my head,etc..." means,how one would draw that conclusion from what I wrote,nor how that would square with the Carter Doctrine,which was a relatively more bellicose proclamation of what American policy in the Middle East had been for most of the 20th century and continuing to the present.
Please explain just how the American president skipping hand-in-hand with his buddy Bandar through the bluebonnets and sagebrush and the prince leaving his money on the nightstand in the morning relates to your obligatory shot at Carter(after your obligatory shot at King and Jackson)and,more urgently, how it is after 2 comments you failed to take an obligatory shot at Clinton?The ventriloquist whose lap you crawled down off would be disappointed at the performance of his Rushbot.

Irish, what doe Jimmy Carter and his own brand of loser diplomacy have to do with the asslicking the House of Bush does on the House of Saud?

Anon, seem's to me that Jethro might be your Dad. About that much original thought going on in your head.

As for Bush and the Saudi's relationship, didn't I state that I didn't care for them either? Also, remind me again how much the Saudi's donated to Clinton's library? taking money from the House of Saud has become a regular perk of being our President. That DOESN'T make it OK, but it is a fact.

"I know you are but what am I?" is what you come up with?
However,thank you for the obligatory Clinton shot,even if you did take the long way there.Since you brought it up,how much did the Saudi's donate to the Clinton library?You have the internet at your fingertips-you can't expect someone else to always do the heavy (for you,that is,Jethro) intellectual lifting.
And still unanswered is what "bury my head in the sand and hope they go away" means.

As I have said before, it's unrealistically simplistic to take regimes like the Saudis and Pakistanis, who offer a fair amount of cooperation to the U.S. and are generally not openly hostile, and apply to them the same approach as one would take to declared enemies like Iran or Saddam's Iraq.

That said, it's stories like this that we need to use to remind ourselves regularly that they can't be trusted, either. And I do think that this Administration could and should have been tougher on the Saudis, and the next one should be.

Of course it's simplistic.Just as it's foolish and childlike to suggest that anything is as easy as 'good vs. evil',or the failure to place contemporary events into an historical context.
America's "declared enemies like Iran" are frequently as much or more the result of our failings as of theirs.The American CIA engineered a coup of the democratically elected government of Iran in 1953 after the Iranian prime minister took steps to nationalize the oil industry(he had the radical notion that the Iranian people should benefit from the oil that was under their feet).The "Death to America" signs that were 'inexplicably' waved outside the US Embassy in 1979 were a result of the Iranian awareness of who bore responsibility for them enduring 26 years of murder and torture at the hands of the Shah and his SAVAK who came to power as a result of that coup.
Also airbrushed from history (in this country,at least) is US support for Saddam and Iraq after his armies invaded Iran in 1980,which included the US Navy patrolling the gulf on behalf of Iraq,destroying an Iranian passenger plane in the process.Over 1 million Iranians died in that war.
The relative 'kid gloves' approach you advocate for the Saudis (where the oil industry is 100% nationalized ,whose leaders are not freely elected, and where the state religion is a fundamentalist school of Islam known as Wahhabism that may have at least partially motivated 15 of the 19 hijackers of 9/11) is comically hypocritical in light of your demonization of,for instance, the popularly elected Hugo Chavez,whose bellicose rhetoric is largely a result of the US attempt to engineer a coup in 2002 contemporaneous with Chavez making clear his intent to increase Venezuela's share of the profits of their oil industry(he has the radical notion that the Venezuelan people should benefit from the oil that is under their feet).Just as dangerous (to US policy makers,and their cheerleaders like yourself) is Chavez' criticism of and efforts to offer an alternative to the neoliberal economic model imposed upon Latin America from the north that has left a trail of debt and increased economic inequality (similar to what we are seeing in this country as an increasing share of the national wealth is concentrated at the top).

Hey I take Crank to task all the time for his conservative views, but you have to give him credit here for posting criticism of the Saudis. Plus, he knows he baseball.

You're right,he does know baseball.