As the years go by, the stories of national shame that crop up whenever George Bush travels outside the US are becoming a little fatigued. Even when he obligingly curses during a conversation with Tony Blair and it gets caught on tape, the old magic just isn’t there. Says Arianna Huffington, in this instance:
Has there ever been a more feeble statement by a U.S. president than “See, the irony is what they really need to do is get Syria to get Hezbollah to stop doing this shit and it’s over”?
If this is now considered feeble, then we’re going to need a new word for most of the foreign policy statements that occur when the microphones are supposed to be on, as well as for much of Huffington’s own website. No, we need a new angle on these stories. We need energy and vigor. We need, in short, an argument that Bush’s visit to Germany bears the sinister hallmarks of Communism.
For my money, the best part is the suggestive juxtaposition of Bush pecking Angela Merkel on the cheek with Gorbachev doing the same to Erich Honecker. (Although, in fairness to Bush, not on the same cheek.) The diarist goes on to darkly warn us that:
Honecker resigned in a coup less than two weeks later. The Berlin Wall was opened on November 9th, 1989, and the two German states were re-unified on October 3rd, 1990. After its 40th birthday, East Germany did not survive another year.
Fantastic. (I will stipulate, however, that if Merkel’s political career does implode within the next two weeks I owe this diarist an apology.)
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