No joke.

I guess Bush sees something he likes.

That some Pakistanis believe that the vote kicked Musharraf out of office only shows that some Pakistanis don't understand their own political system very well.

One Western diplomat said, however, that the strategy could backfire if Pakistanis feel betrayed after voting to kick Musharraf from office. “This is dangerous,” said the diplomat.

I would hope that most Western countries hire a better class of diplomat than this, someone smart enough to notice that Musharraf's presidency wasn't on the ballot.

To run with cian's train of thought, a significant chunk of Pakistan's (and the entire region's) instability can be directly traced to Musharraf's weakness and corruption - keeping him in power is pretty much guaranteed to maintain the status quo of a resurgent Taliban and never seriously looking for OBL & AQ. But Bush is too stupid, short-sighted, and insulated from reality to grasp this.