I suggest you take a hard look at Pat Roush and the life she has led before you take her part against the Bushes. She was pretty quiet during the Clinton years, and the girls were MIA then, too. Only during the two Bush admins has she made a lot of noise. A Berkeleyite with a long history of "marital masochism" with her Saudi husband--she thinks that Bush won't help her because of his "family oil."
I make a point of reminding people of this--National Review Online, for some reason, has made a pet of this nutcase.
As far as Pat goes, I was bothered her daughters are now adults and she was slumping for PR?
Don't blame the victim.
As in most abusive situations, any way a woman and her (female) children survive will seem impossible and fantastic to the rest of us.
I would have expected this administration to be more helpful than the last, too. It would be frustrating to be denied help where it's most expected, wouldn't you think?
I'm not sure that in practical terms it matters who is in the White House. I get the impression that State Department is a sovreignty on its own - or at least the bureaucrats may act as thought they are.
Why would anyone try to make Ms. Roush out as the one who is in the wrong, here? She is obviously the victim, as her daughters, Ms. Saga and her children.
NRO doesn't sound critical about Ms. Roush from this article.
http://www.nationalreview.com/murdock/murdock072502.asp Or this one from July 2002
http://www.nationalreview.com/dreher/dreher071602.asp "" Roush has been trying ever since to get her children back, with virtually no help from the State Department, which, in theory, is supposed to work for Americans. In fact, State has an appalling record of appeasing the Saudis in these matters, a fact that has been pointed out with prophetic outrage most recently by the Wall Street Journal editorial page and its editorialist, William McGurn.""
and
"" Let Congress recognize this for what it is: a hostage situation, perpetuated by the Saudi rulers, and abetted for 16 years by appeasing American diplomats. ""
and
""Congress should order State to deny visas to any Saudi government official until and unless Aisha and Alia al-Gheshayan, and indeed all American citizens held illegally in Saudi Arabia, are allowed to return home.""
and
"" Americans should realize, though, that their own government is a great obstacle to a just resolution to these cases. As Ali al-Ahmed, the Saudi democracy activist who runs the Virginia-based Saudi Institute, tells NRO, "I'm amazed by the way the State Department has behaved in the Roush case, and several other cases. Is it the U.S. State Department, or the Saudi State Department?"""
or this one,
http://www.nationalreview.com/mowbray/mowbray022403.asp "" he head of the State Department's Bureau of Consular Affairs (CA), Maura Harty, is hosting an event at the Hotel Washington Monday with about 65 left-behind parents of children abducted to foreign lands. Harty sent form-letter invites to the parents in December, but the invitation list was missing the names of the two parents who State views as the biggest troublemakers: Patricia Roush and Thomas Johnson. According to an official in her bureau, Harty is trying to "send a message to all left-behind parents that you should not stir the pot."
Today's gathering is just the latest in a series of snubs suffered by Roush and Johnson. Roush, whose daughters Alia and Aisha were kidnapped from their suburban Chicago home in 1986 by their Saudi father, has persistently created headaches for State over the past 17 years. ""