It’s not often a president gets to overrule nearly his entire foreign affairs team and the Vatican itself. Columnist Bob Novak in the Washington Post reveals that quietly, almost secretly – as he puts it “this was no political stunt to revive Bush’s anemic poll ratings” the President, over the objections of the State Department, our man in China (whom Novak points out is referred to as Ambassador Squish by pro-freedom forces in China) and even the Catholic Church itself, led by the former Archbishop of Washington, Theodore Cardinal McCarrick, President Bush met with the Roman Catholic Cardinal of Hong Kong Joseph Zen, a leading pro-democracy and human rights agitator and advocate. Cardinal Zen apparently left the meeting elated. Novak thinks this signifies the real George W. Bush, and for friends of freedom and religious liberty everywhere, this piece is worth a read here.

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