For reasons that are not especially mysterious, when he gave his UN speech today Barack Obama tried very hard to not sound like George W. Bush. Bush’s foreign policy was not especially popular either at home or abroad, because it involved killing a lot of people for reasons that spanned the spectrum of suck: avarice, megalomania, incompetence, stupidity, ignorance. They had fed the heart on fantasies; the heart grew brutal from the fare; and from Maine to Morocco, Calcutta to Kalamazoo, humanity came together as one, united in the the common opinion that everyone associated even remotely with the Bush administration was an absolute douche. George W. Bush bought the world a Coke, to keep it company, and to waterboard it with, and in general, nobody likes him and his gang of assholes, world without end, amen.

I don’t suppose there was much news in the speech, though more plugged in tea-leaf-readers (to smash some metaphors) may disagree. On Israel/Palestine, Obama seemed to me to be taking the same line he’s already taken, and, well, overall, I guess Obama gives a good speech and is clearly going places, maybe all the way to the Top.

I wasn’t much surprised by the Right Blog reaction either, which can be summarized briefly as "BLARG BLUG NAIVE FLERGH KILL KILL DIE DIE KILL RANDOM JEREMIAH WRIGHT REFERENCE ACORN BOOGA BOOGA." The usual, in other words. But due deference was of course made to the awesomely discredited John Bolton, whose defiant bloody-minded delusions of dangerous consequence are concretely symbolized by the asinine, angry, hateful mustache he insists on sporting. As Bob Keeshan’s evil twin told a giggly, starstruck NRO "reporter":

Former U.S. ambassador to the United Nations John Bolton tells NRO that President Obama’s address to the U.N. was “a post-American speech by our first post-American president. It was a speech high on the personality of Barack Obama and high on multilateralism, but very short in advocating American interests.”

Heh. Bolton has clearly been chewing that "first post-American president" line for a while, like a little cud of spite. It doesn’t actually mean anything, but I’m sure he likes the juice of it dribbling down his chin. Failures of Bolton’s craptacular class typically enjoy that particular bitterness, as they have not much else to savor. But it’s the end of the piece that fascinates:

Bolton’s conclusion: “It was all extremely naïve. The president did everything he could to say: ‘Can’t we all just get along?’”

Hmmm. Adam Blickstein thinks this Rodney King shout-out is an injection of "the politics of race": "invoking Rodney King is a fairly intellectual way to examine the merits of the President’s General Assembly address. But asking that question is far less pernicious than saying ‘Every nation in every region now has a decision to make. Either you are with us, or you are with the terrorists.’"

And there may be something to that. But on a more basic level it shows that Bolton is someone who never managed to grasp the fact that when your lens for understanding the world and how to deal with it consists of an arsenal of ancient catchphrases, combined with bombs, you’re going to fuck up royally, bloodily, if your country ever goes bugshit nuts enough to put you in a position of power.


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