IT'S A SHAME THE WAY YOU BEAT YOUR KIDS. NOW, LET'S PARTY. This morning at the U.S. Embassy in Beijing, President Bush made some human rights noises in front of some Chinese officials. He had criticized the Chinese more strongly during an earlier stopover in Bangkok.

A Chinese spokesman made some counter-noises. Later everyone's going to the Olympic opening ceremonies. Be sure to watch on NBC!

You expect Kissinger to say Bush's part in this mutual ass-covering enterprise is "important," and I regret to say the same is true of Mayor Bloomberg:

"I thought the president of the United States stood up this morning and said what a lot of Americans believe: that individual rights aren't as open there as they are in America and that they should be," Mr. Bloomberg said yesterday at a press conference in Lower Manhattan. "I thought the president should go to the opening games — he is going to go. I thought he should speak out, and he did, and I was pleased to see that."

As long as nobody loses any money over it. I sort of miss the earlier, simpler time when History's Greatest Monster had us boycott the Moscow Olympics because of another big Communist country's aggression against some little country that we later invaded.

UPDATE. Naomi Klein explains. This isn't Berlin '36*, when the Nazis tried to keep their repressive policies on the down-low. It's an international trade show for totalitarians.

* Ralph Peters, of course, already told us that the new Berlin Olympics was the 2004 Democratic Convention. More conservative ChiCom sympathy here.