One wonders why certain people get dragged from underneath their rock and elevated into important positions, where they can actually do a lot of damage. From her bile in The Wall Street Journal about Obama’s trip to Moscow, it is clear that former State Department official Liz Cheney understands nothing – exactly zilch – of international diplomacy. The world should hope that, should the US have the misfortune of ever electing a Republican administration again, Liz Cheney is not given a new position in it.
For the record: I am not a huge Obama fan. While I think that Barack Obama is a huge improvement over the idiot who ran the White House before him, Obama is no superpresident. He’s doing better than #43, but then again: the fresh turd I can see lying on the street from my window would have done a better job running the US than Obama’s predecessor.
With that out of the way, on with the show. Liz Cheney in an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal tries to wipe the court with Obama because he chatted up Cold War history to a bunch of Russian students. Obama was in Moscow to talk trade, weapons reduction and agreement to US weapon transports via Russian soil.
You can read the op-ed yourself, so I’m not going to repeat it here again. Suffice it to say that Liz Cheney, daughter of That Man Who, As Vice-President, Ran Illegal Secret Operations As An Elected Official While Withholding Information To Congress, thinks that Obama should have given the Russian students an earful about how bad the Soviet Union was. How it mistreated its own civilians, and the countries it ran through puppet regimes in Eastern Europe and Central Asia.
It’s all true. The USSR was led by a bunch of no-good criminals that occupied nations as the criminals saw fit, invaded countries whenever it wanted to, and also invented the Lada car (THEY DID!? Jesus!- ed).
But that still doesn’t mean that some president of another country should barge into a classroom while on an official visit, and start talking down the country of the present students in no uncertain terms, like Cheney suggests Obama should have done.
Why? Easy. Turn the tables. Suppose Russian president Medvedev visits Washington, and after all the niceties and photo ops he walks into a classroom and starts reminding the kids there that America was, at times, actually a pretty damn nasty country. Something about wiping out the native peoples, invading countries (Mexico comes to mind), meddling in internal affairs of just about every nation on the American continent (something about a ‘Monroe Doctrine’), Vietnam, and of course the pet project of Lizzie’s dad: Iraq.
I can already imagine the headlines, even in The New York Times. It would be universally condemned – by everyone. It is just something you don’t do in diplomacy. Liz Cheney should know that, but she doesn’t, because she’s obviously crazy. Still, she actually worked in the State Department. When? Oh, when #43 was in power.
“Oh, right…” indeed.
And then Cheney has the gall of accusing Obama of not knowing his history. On what does she base this? Well, she accuses Obama of having said that the United States of America is much like, well, any other nation on this earth.
On the so-called ‘American Exceptionalism’, a contradiction in terms anyway, Obama apparently said: “I believe in American Exceptionalism just as I suspect that the Brits believe in British exceptionalism and the Greeks believe in Greek exceptionalism.”
Oh my. Astonishing, isn’t it?! Just imagine, that huge patch of land with rivers and mountains and rocks and trees and mice and bears and grass and cars and buildings and houses and sewage and electricity and a thriving porn industry in between Canada and Mexico is much like, well, the country you live in! It’s just that they probably talk a different language, have a different flag, sing a different national hymn, and are madly in love with their television sets while they elect into office people who can name the first six letters of the alphabet. (Okay, the last one was really a bad joke, we elect idiots too.)
But no. Obama’s wrong, Cheney says. America is actually The Best Country In The Worldâ„¢, better than all other countries on this planet, and all the world should bow before the American King as he sits on his throne and picks his nose.
Well, read this, missus ‘I know history’ Cheney. The Brits thought they were exceptional, and you lot got so fed up with it that you fought them for years to kick ‘em out. But it didn’t take you guys too long before you started acting exactly like they did, now did you?
But hey. If you personally say that you’re exceptional, I actually can’t argue with that. You’re a Republican, after all, and I hear that that breed is growing more exceptional every day.
Communicatiestrateeg en schrijver van het boek ‘Megafoonpolitiek‘. Op Twitter te vinden als @kajleers. Politiek bewust, voormalig financieel-economisch journalist, muziekmaker, professionele kletskous, schrijver. Geeft ook social media-trainingen, denkt graag met je mee over communicatiestrategie. En ja, content is en blijft King.