I think that if I were in a room with Ahmadinejad I would need to take at least 5 showers to work off the smell. I wish that some “The Day of the Jackal” character could have put an explosive bullet through his rat face as he was speaking at the U.N. – or better yet a few years ago when he was at Columbia University.
hat tip – Powerline
by Bret Stephens
It’s a few minutes before eight in the morning on Tuesday, and the 30 or so journalists who have assembled to meet Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in the conference room of a midtown Manhattan hotel are gorging themselves on lox and bagels and wondering whether the buffet is some kind of sly catering joke. A prominent TV personality seated next to me is approached by an Iranian film crew wanting to know her thoughts about their president. She says something cringingly obsequious about how gracious he is for making himself available to the media.
I suppose she’s simply trying to be polite, and perhaps taking care not to say anything that could cause trouble for her or her colleagues down the road. But it dawns on me that the exchange also captures the central dynamic of the meeting. We get access to Ahmadinejad—and the feeling of self-importance that goes with that. In exchange, we pay him court.
The first question goes to an editor from Fortune magazine, who wants to know how the Iranian economy is doing. Ahmadinejad devotes a good 10 minutes to extolling Iran’s economic strengths—industrial exports have “tripled”; investment in infrastructure is way up; the service sector is thriving; agriculture has experienced “a gradual but consistent pattern of growth.”
[…]
In the New York Times’s account of the breakfast, reporter Neil MacFarquhar—who asked an opaque question about Cyrus the Great and was roundly mocked for it by Ahmadinejad—described the president’s remarks as “standard talking points” plus “a little fresh bluster.” Perhaps I haven’t achieved the appropriate degree of jadedness, but my own impression of Ahmadinejad was that he was easily the smartest guy in the room. He mocked us in a way we scarcely had the wit to recognize. We belittle him at our peril.
Read the rest here: Breakfast with Ahmadinejad
****NCAA FOOTBALL THREAD IS STILL OPEN FOR FOOTBALL AND OPEN TALK****
Tags: Bret Stephens
