The most striking thing about the president's speech today was how little advance coverage it received in the American press. A gathering of the leaders of this many nations is a once in a decade occurence, yet barely mentioned either before, during, or after our own leader's speech.
I took this to mean the President's political advisors were afraid it would not show Bush in a good light, either because of heckling, or because they had seen the speech and thought it sucked. Therefore, I was looking forward to it.
cont'd
Riddled with facial tics, the President nonetheless seemed to have his state of perpetual anxiety tamped down at least as well as normal, although as the speech wore on, and his rising tempos of triumphant sound bytes failed to generate the expected applause, you could see he was rattled.
He mentioned the great nation of 'Kurzekstan', and the camera wavered between a shot of the Kyrgiz and Khazak delegations before giving up and returning to the American president.
He lectured the delegates on corruption, farm subsidies, and DEBT, of all things. He bragged about how much we Americans were doing in our fight against the African problem of AIDS, invited other nations to join us, but didn't offer to join any one else's effort, which apparently involves condoms and other immoral devices.
He promised the largest trading nation on earth would drop its extravagant agricultural subsidies, as soon as the poorest dropped their only sources of state income, their tariffs.
His voice rising to a crescendo, he gleefully proclaimed the liberation of Iraq as a freedom-loving nation's greatest triumph, and even mentioned the purple fingers, I believe.
The Iraqi delegates sat with their heads down. The camera cut to Laura sitting next to a tall picturesque African woman with some kind of East African headdress, probably her American Secret Service guard.
He forcefully flipped the pages of speech, dispensing with each in it's turn, just as he would dispense with each recalcitrant delegate and the nation he or she represented if need be. He grinned wildly as he pronounced freedom on the march. He winked inappropriately, at some one he imagined to be a friend in the front row, several times. Finally he stopped talking, and once again I fought back my disgust for a country I used to love, and a people I used to believe in, who had elected him.