Hellloooo! (Read that in a British accent, will you?) The Times Online has a cheeky little
editorial by Alice Miles today in which Dubya is told, with resignation, to just "sod off" already.
Let me open this first, though, with a New York Times story from last week.
Our Department of Homeland Security is once again going to great lengths to protect us in the most effective ways. They will be monitoring the global press to seek out "threats to our nation" with a $2.4 million university grant. Nevermind the nukes and so forth. The real threat is the pen:
Universities help in plan to monitor global press
Government grant to develop software
Eric Lipton, New York Times
Wednesday, October 4, 2006
Washington -- A consortium of major universities, with Homeland Security Department funds, is developing software that would let the government monitor negative opinions of the United States or its leaders in newspapers and other publications overseas.
The "sentiment analysis" is intended to identify potential threats to the nation, security officials said.
Researchers at institutions including Cornell, the University of Pittsburgh and the University of Utah intend to test the system on hundreds of articles published in 2001 and 2002 on topics like President Bush's use of the term "axis of evil," the handling of detainees at Guantanamo Bay, the debate over global warming and the coup attempt against President Hugo Chavez of Venezuela.
A $2.4 million grant will finance the research over three years.
Well, let's get started then, shall we? Here's one for the database: Miles' rather dim reflection on our president from across the pond. The "sentiment" herein doesn't really require expert analysis:
When the world doesn't care what the US president says, we're in a mess
Alice Miles
I REMEMBER a time when, following an event of international significance, the world would wait to hear what the president of the United States had to say about it. In Britain we would have an impatient few hours before America had woken up. Because until the President had spoken, you couldn't be sure of even the shape of what might happen next.
On Monday we woke to the news of North Korea's nuclear test, and to a banal commentary of people who didn't really know what to say about it. Just when you wanted some real insight and even facts, the Today programme again indulged its tiresome obsession with Iraq, focusing upon whether Tony Blair's actions there had made this move by Kim Jong Il more likely blah blah. That didn't surprise me. What did was my instinctive reaction when George W. Bush did speak much later in the day. There he was gravely intoning on one or other news channel that this "constitutes a threat to international peace and security", and "Oh sod off" I heard myself muttering, with no desire to hear any more. It was as much ennui as irritation: I didn't believe he would have anything useful to say and found it faintly annoying that he spoke as though the world would care.
I reached this point long ago. Didn't you? Does any objective viewer have the patience to listen to this guy drone on with his informationless drivel anymore?
One reaction from a completely insignificant voice in the political process. Yet it reveals, I think, a sad truth: the 43rd President of the United States of America has squandered the political authority of a great country. Never mind whether world leaders still feel the need to check in with the US; ordinary people no longer expect from Washington international leadership of any use. So spent is the authority of the United States that even a foreign affairs ingénue such as myself recognises that there is little constructive it can do any more. So it doesn't really matter what the President thinks.
Dubya has reached houseplant status in the eyes of the world.
[...It] is clear that the US cannot respond as it once might have to the test conducted in North Korea. Because of the muck it has made in Iraq, it lacks the political and moral authority to do so. Were it to have wanted to address North Korea's nuclear pretensions, it should have prioritised it over Iraq; the world knew Kim was a brutal tyrant with a nuclear weapon within his reach.
And now we have this: a tinpot totalitarian with no economy to speak of, whose people are starving, thumbing his nose at the world. And we look to China to tell us what happens next. [...]
I hate what the US has done to itself and, were I an American, I would hate it even more. I hate the fact that we now look to China for international leadership. Yes, I know, it's their side of the world, but time was . . .
I hate that we have got into a place where somebody British can even entertain the thought of smiling quietly with satisfaction that the revolting regime of Kim Jong Il has stuck two fingers up to the great United States. I hate it that I didn't care what the President said on Monday.
I hate it that I said sod off.
Our global reputation is in the WC. Dubya has really bollocksed it up for us. You should go read the rest of it, as I've tried to keep it down to fair use here.