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Wednesday, September 26, 2007

Thrilla in New York: President A versus President B

The president of Iran and the president of the USA were both in New York. How did it come out?

Columbia's President, Lee Bollinger, invited president A. to Columbia apparently in order to have a foil to spar with verbally. Under much criticism for having president A. on campus, Mr. Bollinger caved in the best American tradition by dressing up in his uniform of suit and tie and character assassination.
It was very well done. So much so that it passed everyone's attention that Mr. Bollinger was treating president A. as if the president had been at the head of Iran's government for 30 years or so and was the prime motivator behind the return of the Ayatullah and everything since.

President A. was uninteresting, but I assume he was on the ropes and stumbling from Bollinger's diplomatic hatchet-job.

At Columbia, it was apparent that President A. has 2 approaches to the Holocaust:
(1) it did not happen, and
(2) it was not an important moral or spiritual issue to Iran.

Obviously, he should stick to (2), but he was not elected due to his intellectual smarts.

At the UN, President Bush got my very close attention. I was getting my hair cut and beard trimmed at the local tonsorial salon, Edward Scissorhands, when he mentioned that he was recommending changes in food aid programs, specifically an emphasis on buying food from local farmers in regions which are recipients of food aid programs.
"CARE...!" I said.
"I'm being careful," my barber said. "You have a difficult head."
"No," I replied. "He's implementing the recommendations of CARE...the food aid group C.A.R.E. They stopped receiving federal monies because of...FFs." (FF is an acronymous designation we use locally to indicate " Federal F...." where the last "F" is pronounced as in the word "SNAFU".)
"I listened on C-Span...there was a recommendation for this local buying of food, " I continued.
"Mmmm...?" intoned the snip-meister.
"Well, you can imagine how imported free food sort of works against the local farmers...sort of like well...if you give a guy a fish, he can feed his family for one day; if you teach him how to fish, he can feed his family forever, and if you import free fish from the USA bought by the government of the USA from your rich backers in the fishing industry, you can destroy a local economy as well as diverting a large portion of those free fish to enrich corrupt local politicians."

By this time, metal had been used to trim my eyebrows and bad luck was in the cards for an undetermined amount of time. I was upset. The barber said it was not his fault because my spiel was so-o-o interesting.
Anyhow, so President Bush actually sounded pretty good. I was amazed. Then I remembered he used to be an O.K. guy. Then he criticized somebody there about human rights violations...somebody here...everywhere a somebody who was being undemocratic and he underscored this concern by saying that nothing was said about all this at the UN, but they did criticize Israel...Israel who, by implication, was a stellar example of implementing human rights, and so on.

Well, that did burst my balloon. President Bush is not bad on his own. It's when he says things that so-called conservative intellects tell him to say that he stumbles. Case in point: The Jewish National Fund, founded in 1901 and an emblem of Jewish life in Israel, recently has decided or been forced into a limited trial period during which it will actually consider selling land to non-Jews. This was announced Monday, September 24, 2007, in advance of a High Court discussion on three petitions calling on the Israel Lands Administration (ILA) to stop restricting public tenders for JNF land to Jews.
I still like Israel. I really like Israelis...though not Bibi Netanyahu. However, using Israel as an EMBLEM for human rights does not have quite the effect neocon clowns seem to think it has. Israel can be a symbol for a lot of things, but it is not a great choice for a symbol of the extension of human rights to minorities within its power.
Neither are Arab countries, even though certain minorities are Dhimmii, a word which translates as " the people of (our) protection".  
If you do not believe me, ask Daniel Pipes. He has written much about the minority Arabs in Israel, referring to them as a "time bomb", thereby implying that their mere fact of existence is a terrorist threat !

If the president of Iran had said that, how would Lee Bollinger have reacted?

At the end, it seems the consensus of the limp minds that run Cable News that President A. is insane. How insightful.
Many people have said that President B. is deranged. How cogent.

So there was a meeting of mad men in New York. It was reported by Cable News and commented on by the unintelligent. As a result, the great drooling hoards momentarily interrupted their hunt, sniffed the air, then growled.
A Mr. Daniel Jackson (not the Daniel Jackson of Stargate!) was in an Eye Clinic in Grosse Pointe Woods, Michigan, USA when President Ahmedinajad was speaking at Columbia. During the speech, Mr. Jackson commented " Get a tie!"
Little did Mr. Jackson know that he was parroting something Tucker Carlson once said. This is the same Tucker Carlson who tried to engineer intellectual acumen by propping a bow tie on his collar. (this news article was from News of the Dim and Not-so Dim)

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