Sudhan @21:15 CET
Federal and state authorities are hotly pursuing an alleged rapist/killer Marine on the run in some southeastern state. Updates on the search crawl under the CNN feed all day. Meanwhile, the screen displays a different sort of heinous American criminal, at large in, of all places, Abu Dhabi. This one, unfortunately, is unlikely to be apprehended anytime soon.
Our Commander in Chief has been striding around the Middle East talking exactly like a man whose opinion carries some Solomonic weight, not like somebody who spent the last four years waging a “war on terror” that killed hundreds of thousands of Arab civilians and displaced millions more.
Dead civilians is the first and worst charge, real felonies if the world justice system worked. Add in the civil claims against him: squandering of international trust and belief in America, domestic economic wreckage, the revolting trampling of civil rights, the thieving of the treasury by no-bid cronies, and the unleashing of a grisly, vicious war that has (read yesterday’s gutsy New York Times report) made psychotic killers of our own young men, and we have a world-class criminal, on the loose.
I don’t truly believe that the people in the Middle East believe he is Solomonic or even representative of the American people. I believe the average middle easterner thinks the man is the equivalent of the village idiot looking for his village.
Look, truly, he is resoundingly HATED pretty much everywhere in the world. I believe one poll recently mentioned that 87 countries were praying for our deliverance in 2008! It’s not just us….
So let him strut – he’s a filthy warmongering sack of manure – with no brains and no morals. The rest of the world knows that we all hate this stooge…it’s not exactly a state secret.
The Saudis have their own agenda – they aren’t exactly sitting pretty with their own people. Popularity in SA is pretty tentative. The Saudis have an iron grip on their own people, but one little overthrow of the Faisal family will send the entire Middle East into total chaos. These are not popular people and their influence is not wide.
Tossing Bush in with the Saudis is like adding gasoline to a flame – he’s just pissed because his office expires and he’ll be a NOTHING and probably make less in speaking fees that Karl Rollover. So he has to try and make back door friends.
They don’t like him and I can guarantee they don’t trust him. These people aren’t stupid…they read polls.
A quote from the Washington Post, via Froomkin:
“President Bush on Monday launched a rare round of intensive personal diplomacy with Saudi King Abdullah aimed at winning support for a variety of American objectives such as rebuilding Iraq, pressuring Iran, fighting al-Qaeda and backing the U.S.-brokered peace talks between Israel and the Palestinians.
“Some diplomats and experts with close ties to the administration say meeting with Abdullah has been the main purpose of the president’s trip to the region. . . .
“Saudi officials have sounded a skeptical note recently about Bush’s drive for more diplomatic and financial pressure on Iran, which the president has emphasized almost daily on his swing through the Middle East. . . .
“One reason for the greater Saudi independence, according to former U.S. diplomats and other experts who deal closely with the kingdom, is that the Saudis have begun to doubt American competence and are looking to forge their own relations with rising powers such as China and regional rivals including Iran.’ . . .
“While publicly polite, the Saudi king and other leading figures also see the incumbent U.S. president as a disappointment — certainly compared with his father, George H.W. Bush, a close friend and former oilman who was lionized here for his handling of the Persian Gulf War. By contrast, former officials and others close to the royal family say, Saudi royals believe Bush has handled issues such as Iran, Iraq and Middle East peace ineptly.”
(See even the Saudis know the man is a borderline idiot.)