Well, well, well… a top-rated Iranian official. has shown his willingness to embrace the new American administration in the spirit of hope and change and brotherhood and peace.
And he’s doing it by calling the president of the United States a nigger.
Well, he didn’t precisely use the N-word. He used the Farsi equivalent. Apparently there is more than one term for a person of African ancestry in Farsi, and he used the most derogatory one.
I find myself with mixed feelings about this.
The first is that it shows that there really isn’t much hope for positive engagement and polite discourse with the Iranian regime. Obama’s been nothing if not obliging to the Iranian regime, almost to the point of obsequiousness, and this is the response. His attempts at reconciliation are being taken as a sign of weakness, and kindness is repaid with contempt. Perhaps this will wake him up to the realities of the world.
The second feeling is anger. I didn’t vote for Obama, despite two opportunities to do so. I consider myself a staunch opponent of many of his policies. (Although I do find myself giving golf applause to his quietly continuing many Bush administration policies that he ran against.) I don’t like the guy, and I plan at this point to work for his defeat in 2012.
But he’s still my president. And I find myself agreeing with the old saw that politics ends at the water’s edge. This camel-humping asswipe from Iran is trash-talking MY president, expressing his contempt for the Chief Executive of the United States in a most vile and base and degrading fashion, and I don’t like it one bit.
He’s OURS to kick around, shithead. NOT yours.
Obviously we shouldn’t base our entire foreign policy around dipshits who’ve managed to score high-ranking positions in despotic, nepotistic regimes, but we would be fools if we didn’t take careful note of which governments tolerate their officials speaking thus about our head of state, and remember carefully their lack of courtesy. We should write off ever giving them the benefit of the doubt, of extending them courtesies and making good-faith gestures, and instead deal with them as if they were the most duplicitous, ill-intended, and malicious people on the face of the earth.
But we shouldn’t get too angry over this. That was the intention of this jackass — to get us all riled up and acting rashly. Perhaps to even respond by making empty threats and blustering a bit. He wants to rattle us, make us lose our cool.
No need. We really shouldn’t expect anything else from the Iranian regime. So there’s no reason to get upset about this one guy calling our president a nigger.
But “not getting angry” doesn’t mean “don’t pay any attention to it” or “forget about it.”
(And if anyone doesn’t get where the title for this piece comes from, see below the fold.)
