The United Nations General Assembly

Jackasses

What a card, that Hugo Chavez, Bush! What a cutup! I sent you that little piece yesterday thinking you'd get a good chuckle out of it. But then he gets up to address the general assembly and calls you a devil, almost to your face! And makes the sign of the cross and brings his hands together in prayer to exorcise the sulphorous aftermath of your presence at the podium.

The nerve of it! But what can you expect from an avowed Socialist, Bush, whose mentor and bosom buddy is none other than the infamous Fidel! The axis of evil must surely have reached across the Atlantic at this point--and probably now extends back across the Pacific to span the globe. The one thing that can be said for this guy, Bush, he doesn't seem to want to spend his oil money on nuclear weapons. Not yet, at least.

And then there's that other speaker at the UN podium, similarly disrespectful. I refer of course to Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, President of Iran. I heard some pretty nasty stuff coming out of his mouth last night in an interview with Anderson Cooper on CNN. Poisonous hatred of Israel and the Jews. He stopped short of holocaust denial, but insisted that the event itself mattered less than where it took place. If he weren't in such a position of power, you could dismiss the guy as an extremist nutcase. But he's well on his way, we're told, to having a nuclear button to push, and that's pretty damn scary. Even if he refrained from using it himself, he'd have a pretty damn big stick to shake at us, and at his neighbors; and I dread to think what might happen if he loaned out a just small piece of that technology to his terrorist buddies.

Listen, Bush, I'm willing to concede that there's something of the tinhorn dictator in both of these jackasses. Trouble is, I see something of the same in your good self. And the real trouble is that they have been handed incredible power in the world. In part it's the oil, of course. They have us, in some sense, by the balls, because we've lacked the gumption to address the fundamental problem of what you rightly called our "oil addiction." They have it, we want it. No, we need it. Which gives them terrible power.

The other part is that we have disempowered ourselves--and allowed ourselves to be further disempowered by the terrorists and the "war" against them which seems to have become our chief raison d'etre in the twenty-first century, thanks to your leadership. We left Afghanistan to the mercy of the Taliban and the Al Qaeda gang whom we failed to finish off when we had the chance, and blithely marched into the hornet's nest of the Middle East by neglecting the simmering Israel-Palestine problem and invading Iraq without forethought or planning as to the consequences. As a result, we have not only stretched our military strength beyond any credible threat to those nasty folk in countires like Iran and North Korea, we have--as your Colin Powell suggested the other day--lost the moral authority we once had as well. This is another, deeper, sadder manifestation of our disempowerment.

We have laid ourselves open to the barbs of the Ahmadinejads and Chavezes of this world--to such an extent that their excesses sound almost reasonable. It's a sorry state of affairs when the President of Venezuela gets to calls the President of the United States of America a devil from the podium of the United Nations. But as my wife Ellie points out, it's only a difference in degree in the name-calling war in which you, Bush, have also been happily indulging. It's a short step from the "evil-doers" you talk about to "El Diablo", the Evil-Doer-in-Chief.

Still, the whole thing seems to be paying off nicely for you--along with freshly reawakened memories of the 9/11 terror attacks. The headline in today's Los Angeles Times announces gains in the polls for you and your Republicans. The American electorate seems to rally to its leadership when their, er, Commander-in-Chief is being pilloried by those foreign rabble-rousers.