[Stultis]

This Valentine's Day, Sen. Tom Harkin won't be giving his wife a box of chocolates -- instead, he'll opt for flowers. He and his colleague, Rep. Eliot Engel, maintain that major U.S. chocolate companies -- Nestle, Mars, and Hershey -- rely on child slave laborers in the Ivory Coast to get their sweets to supermarket shelves.

There are about 600,000 cocoa farms in Cote d'Ivoire (The Ivory Coast). The highest estimates of forced child labor there are 15,000 (Save the Children, Canada). Therefore at least 97.5 percent of cocoa farmers do not use slave labor. So (says the hard left and their liberal dupes) let's screw them to make us feel better. And by all means let's not mention or acknowledge that George W. Bush has done more to combat slavery in Africa and free slaves there, and to combat the sex slave trade in Asia, and to combat human trafficking generally, than any previous president in the last century or more.

[Stultis]

Specifically the Bush administration, through the North-South peace agreement in Sudan -- one of the very first foreign policy initiatives Bush pursued after coming into office -- has already liberated at least as many slave as the 15,000 in The Ivory Coast, and in the end will liberate more than ten times as many.

In this case, as is usual, conservatives actually solve problems, or at least meaningfully address them, while the left prefers superficial, symbolic, "feel good" gestures that, often as not, actually hurt the interests of hard working people in the developing world.

Hard leftists, such as Harkin (and as opposed to well meaning but stupid liberal dupes), actually want to preserve or increase suffering in the developing world as this improves the conditions for radical revolution.

[Darkwolf377]

"And by all means let's not mention or acknowledge that George W. Bush has done more to combat slavery in Africa and free slaves there, and to combat the sex slave trade in Asia, and to combat human trafficking generally, than any previous president in the last century or more."

This shows the hollowness of the dems. Slavery in foreign countries is not exactly a hot issue people vote on, and yet they can't even compliment Bush on that, as it might risk one voter somewhere thinking kindly of him for five minutes. It's this kind of thing I think of when I see Reid and Pelosi lying about "reaching out" and all that garbage.