F-16s, Google, and Hillary Clinton

There’s some shit going down between the U.S. and China right now, and since CNN is only capable of focusing on one story at a time, I thought I should come to their aide.

At the center is the Hillary Clinton arm of the Obama administration who has been pissing off Chinese officials in the past two months. There are 3 main contentions:

(1) Stopping Iran from obtaining nuclear weapons by imposing a U.S. lead U.N. sanction on Iran’s Islamic “republic” leadership. Everyone is on board, including Russia, which we thought may be a problem initially–everyone, that is, except China. China seeks to lose a major source of oil in their relationship with Iran by imposing sanctions. At a time when China’s economy is growing, this energy source is indispensable to China. So they are balking at any UN Resolution and they have Veto power.

(2) Obama has agreed to meet with the Dalia Lama, which really has pissed the Chinese off. This has been further aggravated by the U.S. currently agreeing to supply arms to Taiwan, including a fleet of F-16 fighters, 114 Patriot missiles, 60 Black Hawk helicopters, and some communications equipment. China has retaliated by saying they will provide medium range missiles to Pakistan.

(3) Clinton has sided with Google–against China–in a freedom of information dispute. China wants to censor Google.Cn and even Google.com from showing search results that include the Dalia Lama, Tiananmen Square, and other freedom issues that China deems inappropriate. This, too, was further aggravated when Google accused China of hacking into their Gmail accounts to obtain information about rebels who had been using Gmail to share information. Google has threatened to pull its operations out of China. Unfortunately, spineless investors pulled some stock out of Google since this conflict, and Google stock has plummeted a bit, along with the rest of the market which has seen a heavy decline over the past few weeks. Google’s moral stance being discouraged by investor greed and fear.

P.S. CNN–are you still covering Michael Jackson’s chimp’s reaction to his death? How’s that going?