Silly Little Country

Woo Hoo - Julie Burchill

Poor woman will never get to work at the CBC if she insists on writing this sort of stuff! And she points accurately how much is a smug and pathetic snobbery.

And remember the mixed infants playground-quality jeering — BUSH NEEDS TO GO POTTY — when in 2005, during a UN world summit, Bush made the unforgivable error of passing a note to his Secretary of State saying: “I think I may need a bathroom break? Is this possible?".

Firstly, can I say how refreshing and charming I found it to see a privileged white man — the most powerful man in the world! — ask the advice of his black female subordinate, assuming, without any threat to his status or masculinity, that she knew more about such things than he.

And secondly, let’s not forget that there were more than 150 “world leaders” there — prime ministers, presidents and monarchs — some of them probably not democratically elected.

Let’s be honest, some of them probably filthy rich, corrupt, unelected feudal Islamist potentates.

And Arab pride is apparently so pathetically fragile that its honour can be “insulted” at the tiniest perceived slight.

Who knows what a firestorm a President peeing without permission might have caused among these delicate desert flowers?

Why, they might have done something really butch and Carrie Bradshaw-ish like throwing their shoes at him!

And it is easy to forget the praise from people who were paying attention to things that mattered elsewhere in the world and that I guess the CBC experts think are the domain solely of the manifestly increasingly useless, nay pernicious, UN.

The great Natan Sharansky — who learned a thing or two about humanity during years banged up in Soviet labour camps — once said to Bush: “Mr President, I see you as a dissident. Dissidents believe in an idea. They suffer a lot. But history proves them right.”

AND

IN our recent book Not In My Name: A Compendium Of Modern Hypocrisy, my co-author Chas Newkey-Burden quotes none other than Bob Geldof as saying, “You’ll think I’m off my trolley, but the Bush administration is the most radical – in a positive sense – in its approach to Africa, since Kennedy”.

Chas goes on to say: “Sir Bob contrasted this to Europe’s ‘pathetic and appalling’ response and Clinton’s record, ‘He did **** all’.”

Many aid charities have echoed his praise for Bush. Bono, too, has had many good things to say about him.

I am not welling with hope about Tuesday's inauguration. We are seeing the arrival of a pretty inexperienced windbag with highly interventionist instincts, ill-schooled by any successful experience other than using rhetorical skills to infuse the very naive with Hopeyness. Having said that, his transition still leaves me moderately optimistic, but I am always so.

h/t Kathy Shaidle

And moreover, go to the Burchill article and read it. The two photographs on the page are lovely and very revealing.

posted by Alan Adamson @ 10:17 AM