cur-mud-geon:
anyone who hates hypocrisy and pretense and has the temerity to say so; anyone with the habit of pointing out unpleasant facts in an engaging and humorous manner
The invitation extended by Columbia University to Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, President of Iran, to speak to its student body was simply wrong in my opinion.
He gained; Columbia and we lost. That could’ve been avoided had the brilliant leaders of Columbia University simply not invited Ahmadinejad to speak. Our intellectual elite seem to think they can debate this man. They cannot for several reasons. He has no morality about him to which we can equate. He states outright lies over and over again. He denies things we’ve heard come from his mouth before. He insists Iran has no interest in nuclear weapons, and yet he brags of the tens of thousands of centrifuges that can only be producing weapons grade materials. He insists that Iran is not active in Iraq, yet we capture his operatives on a regular basis. Iranian-produced weapons are used to kill our troops weekly in Iraq, and now even in Afghanistan.
He made no surprising statements. He admitted to nothing. He belittled the introduction/accusation delivered by the Columbia University president during his introduction; and Ahmadinejad won loud applause from the assembled audience for having done so.
Fortunately, he was not permitted to go near the site of destruction, ground zero, on 9/11. Had that been permitted, we would’ve seen the photos appearing all over the world with him reciting his thoughts about the martyrs while he stood on that hallowed ground.
In short, Ahmadinejad scored, what for him was, a huge PR victory. He scored that at our expense.
I have long been one of those “crazies” who wonder why we’re still involved with the United Nations given its total and complete ineffectiveness. The only two things the UN is good at are consumption of huge amounts of money (the majority of which seems to come from us), and scandalous corruption.
Maybe we should simply use the laws of eminent domain to reclaim our land. Let the UN go someplace else without our money with which to pay them. That would’ve caused Ahmadinejad to never have been invited to set foot on our soil. Columbia would not have invited him if he weren’t going to have been here. That would’ve been good.
