September 28, 2009 -- He has made 13 Sunday morning appearances on TV since inauguration in January. 13! That’s 36 Sundays for an average of an appearance every 2.7 weeks. Sounds like over exposure. President Obama? No, the person Tina Brown refers to as “grumpster” John McCain. Do we really want to hear more from Him? We didn’t get enough of him during the primary and presidential campaigns? I want to hear from the President, but McCain can put a sock in it. The President is giving him a run for his money, and by contrast is articulate, even lightly funny as this remark he made to David Letterman: “I was actually black before the election.”
Of course McCain is still welcome on FOX while that network decided not to broadcast the President’s fourth prime-time news conference, nor his address to Congress on health insurance reform either.
Not that there isn’t a lot on the table to talk about; think health insurance, economy, climate change, Afghanistan, Dancing With the Stars. As NYT columnist David Brooks wrote, “Improving society is so intractably hard that all efforts to do so should be subject to the most careful scrutiny.” But we are spending so much time scrutinizing some of these problems we are not making anything happen.
The answer at the moment seems to be “let’s take a meeting.” I’m beginning to feel like I am back in the business world where we moved from one meeting to another (which in a way did prepare me for retirement where we move from one doctor’s appointment to another).
Meetings. There was the meeting in New York of the United Nations general assembly where world leaders took their allocated fifteen minutes (and a couple of times much, much more). President Obama’s remarks were sensible and to the point calling for collective action to be taken on big problems (the President has seen to it that we have paid our back dues and are no longer the dead beat member we were under the Bush administration), but the usual Obama-haters and would be UN destroyers, like John Bolton, once our representative to the organization who wanted to get rid of it, were as critical as usual. Here is an excerpt from one of the typical scurrilous e-mails that make the rounds: “In the midst of one of the coldest years in history, a record-setting half-year of oil finds, and a growing number of scientists claiming Global Warming a scam, Dear Leader goes before the UN and says the world is headed for catastrophe if it doesn't act NOW!” I won’t give the source on this one; I wouldn’t want to give it the satisfaction but I would like to see the “growing list of scientists” claiming global warming is a scan. That’s like that member of the F.D.A. who has gained publicity for writing s denying there is a problem. Scientist? The man is an economist, with no scientific training but somehow perceives himself an expert on the subject.
Then there was the meeting of the “Group of 20” world leaders in Pittsburgh seeking ways to handle the global financial crises. I am not sure why Pittsburgh, other than to demonstrate what happens when there is a financial crisis.
I shook hands once on a good paying job in Pittsburgh but the guy who offered me the deal was fired before he could get the paper work to the personnel department. There, I suspect, was a personal financial crises I managed to avoid. The city of Pittsburgh does not occupy a favored place in my heart.
Iran managed to disrupt the meeting. It wasn’t enough to shoot off their mouth at the U.N., they had to shoot off missals as well. It came in the face of international reaction to the revelation that they had a secret uranium enhancement facility they had hidden from international inspectors.
The world leaders stepped up to the plate to protest. Obama: the Iranian nuclear program “represents a direct challenge to the basic foundation of the nonproliferation regime.” President Nicolas Sarkozy of France said that Iran had a deadline of two months to comply with international demands or face increased sanctions. “The level of deception by the Iranian government, and the scale of what we believe is the breach of international commitments, will shock and anger the entire international community.” British Prime Minister Gordon Brown: “The international community has no choice today but to draw a line in the sand.” Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany had asked Brown to convey that she stood with them as well So much for the financial crises.
Here is one quote relating to the financial situation in the United States from Rep. George Miller (D-CA) who is introducing some regulatory legislation: “We were paying these exorbitant subsidies to bankers who were taking government money, loaning it to somebody else, getting government guarantees that the loans would be paid back, and then taking all these profits.” By George, Rep. Miller, I believe you’ve got it. Or at least we can hope some people have now got it.
You might call this next meeting, on Thursday in Geneva, a key meeting, a meeting of the Gang of Six in which representatives from the United States and five other major powers who will discuss the nuclear issue with Iranian officials. There is a lot riding on this one and represents the first face to face of the U.S. and Iran. It is being said that even Russia and China are thought to be coming around to agree on severe sanctions on Iran. Iran has all of that oil money to spend. We ought to loan them Bernie Madoff to show them what to do with it.
What could be the most important meeting in the history of mankind is Climate Conference 2009 scheduled for Copenhagen in December. This “may be humanity’s last chance to avoid total chaos.” To see where that quote comes from click here: http://rexweyler.com/blog/
One American who will be present, or so he says, is Sen. James Inhofe, the Oklahoma Republican who has called global warming “the greatest hoax ever perpetrated,” has vowed to take his message in person to the meeting. Sounds like he wants to turn it into a town hall type event: will there be shouting, signs, disruptive demonstrations? Sen. Inhofe has long been quite a piece of work, and now we get to share him with the rest of the world.
Other countries that have jumped enthusiastically into the programs are having very positive experiences. “Efforts on climate change have not undermined economic growth -- in fact they've increased it” says Danish environmental minister Connie Hedegaard. “No contradiction between conservation and growth.” The odd thing is that in Europe it is conservatives pushing the program and they can’t understand why conservatives in the United States are not.
But here, even the U.S. Chamber of Commerce is, in the words of a power company that dropped out of the Chamber put it, their “disingenuous attempts to diminish or distort the reality” of climate change.
Economist and NYT columnist Paul Krugman points to the blog Climate Progress that reports “opponents of climate change legislation ‘keep raising their estimated cost of the clean energy and global warming pollution reduction programs like some out of control auctioneer.’ The Waxman-Markey bill would cost in 2020 the average family only $160 a year, or 0.2 percent of income. Last week Glenn Beck informed his audience of a ‘buried” Obama administration study showing that Waxman-Markey would actually cost the average family $1,787 per year. Needless to say, no such study exists.”
NYT columnist Thomas Friedman today wrote, “Red China decided to become Green China. Too many of their people can’t breathe, can’t swim, can’t fish, can’t farm and can’t drink thanks to pollution from its coal- and oil-based manufacturing growth engine. And, therefore, unless China powers its development with cleaner energy systems, and more knowledge-intensive businesses without smokestacks, China will die of its own development.” This is like what the late author Kurt Vonegut wrote in “Breakfast of Champions” explaining about the fermentation of wine, how a little living organism, yeast, finds a liquid with sugar held in suspension, eats the sugar, excretes alcohol, but when the alcohol level reaches a certain level the yeast dies drowning in its own excreta (bottoms up). China is now furiously developing alternative energy sources, solar, wind, alternative fuels. And think about this: an estimated 2.5 billion people will be added to the planet by the year 2050, making waste, buying cars, using refrigerators. And my grandchildren will not as yet have reached retirement age.
We are confronted by one dire prediction after another. The Vietnamese government just reported that more than one-third of the Mekong Delta could be submerged if sea levels rise by three feet. Well, at least Senator Inhofe can be comforted by the fact that living in Oklahoma means if that happens he won’t get his feet wet.
Another set of dire circumstances is on the agenda and will shortly consume the commentary channels like a rivulet of water moving over ground, filling in all of the cracks: what to do about Afghanistan. It is already warming up and no doubt will take over the whole of next week. It is a no win situation for the Obama administration which will be damned if they accelerate the conflict, and damned if they don’t, or if they scale back. In the words of Betty Davis in character in a movie, “Fasten your seatbelts. It’s going to be a bumpy ride.”
I have experienced a loss today. Linguist William Safire, a man for whom there can be no replacement, passed away today. I suspect there are many others who will find it difficult to get through Sunday without his column if for no other reason than his wit. I hated his politics but was overwhelmed by his way with words. Words count. With that in mind here is a quote by F. Scott Fitzgerald: “You can stroke people with words.” Safire was a master of the stroke.
On the subject of words, at that meeting of the UN, the two people members would have liked to have heard the least from had the most to say. Despite being given fifteen minutes to talk, as were all other speakers, Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad talked so long many members simply got up and walked out, offended by what he had to say.
Making his first appearance ever before the UN, Muammar Qaddafi made it a memorable one by nattering on for over ninety minutes. According to NYT columnist Gail Collins, he advocated breaking Switzerland up into three parts and giving a part to each of the countries that it adjoins. Collins says his son was arrested in Switzerland for misbehaving so he carries a little grudge. As often happens to me the lyrics of a song come to mind, in this case “Lydia the Tattooed Lady,” written for Groucho Marx. A bit of it goes like this:
Oooooooh
Lydia oh Lydia, say have you met Lydia,
Lydia, the Tattooed Lady.
She has eyes that folks adore so,
And a torso even more so.
Lydia oh Lydia, that encyclopedia,
Oh Lydia the Queen of Tattoo.
On her back is the Battle of Waterloo.
Beside it the wreck of the Hesperus, too.
And proudly above waves the Red, White, and Blue,
You can learn a lot from Lydia
Too bad Groucho is not still around to render something like this:
Libya oh Libya say did you hear Libyan
Qaddafi that country’s guru?
UN members he did bore so,
Took the floor spoke more and more so
Libyan you Libyan you stand up comedian
Qaddafi, a word from the wise
In your rambling address to the U N guys
The umbrage at Switzerland only belies
A rational mind ‘neath your headdress lies.
Such a clown we got from Libya.
Clown or not, a man who runs a country with close to 44 billion barrels of oil reserves, the largest in Africa, is going to get some attention.
To give Qaddafi his due, he has in recent years moved to make his country a better citizen of the world, giving up on developing nuclear weapons and last week meeting with and expressing sympathy for the families of two of the victims of the Lockerbie plane bombing. Not that a Hail Mary or two and an act of contrition are going to absolve him from his sins, but next to Ahmadinejad he looks like Horatio Alger. Even I might look like Horatio Alger standing next to the sanity-challenged arrogant Iranian. And that would most certainly be a stretch.
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