UNITED NATIONS – After 40 years of shunning U.N. appearances, Libyan leader Moammar Gadhafi evidently had a lot to get off his chest.
So he stepped to the world's stage, armed with a yellow folder of handwritten notes, and basically emptied his mind.
For a mind-boggling 1 hour and 36 minutes on Wednesday, the so-called king of kings was winging it.
The impact of Gadhafi's long, unprecedented and rambling speech was stunning. Half the cavernous chamber, packed for President Barack Obama's first speech to the U.N. General Assembly, emptied out. Delegates' faces seemed angry, quizzical, fatigued.
From a perch inside the chamber, the light-colored robes of some African and Mideast leaders dotted a sea of dark business suits. Polite applause followed the opening remarks of U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon and General Assembly President Ali Treki.
Dressed in his flowing brown and tan Bedouin robes, and a black beret that he self-consciously patted at times, he listened through a translation earpiece in his right ear and fiddled with the cord in his left hand.
He kept glasses, a red handkerchief and a rumpled yellow folder in front of him on the desk. He jotted a note to himself and put it into the yellow folder. He clapped his hands. Then he flipped through the handwritten pages inside the folders, written in rows of large, flowing bold Arabic letters.
A commotion swept through the room as Obama appeared. Gadhafi joined in light applause and listened with the earpiece in his left ear.
Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad also listened to Obama, tieless and not using an earpiece. Foreign Minister Manouchehr Mottaki and Iran's U.N. Ambassador Mohammad Khazee each listened with earpieces.
As Obama gestured and read from the TelePrompTer, speaking of the dangers of nuclear proliferation, the Iranians listened intently.
Gadhafi, but not Ahmadinejad, applauded Obama at the end of his speech. Though Gadhafi was to speak next, all the prominent U.S. delegates left the chamber, leaving behind note-taking staff.
Treki introduced Gadhafi as the "king of kings." But Gadhafi remained in his seat for another 15 minutes as an awkward silence and confusion gripped the chamber.
Gadhafi didn't seem to care.
He kept shaking hands and talking to people. Finally he dabbed the red handkerchief to his mouth, smiled broadly and enjoyed the moment — the world waiting to hear from the would-be King of the United States of Africa.
He swept his robes over himself and strode to the stage, using the handrail on his way up. He laid the shabby yellow folder in front of him on the podium, and pressed open some of the handwritten pages. There was scattered applause in the half-empty chamber.
Gadhafi held up a copy of the U.N. Charter in his hands. He sported big, shiny rings on each hand. For a moment, it seemed as if he had utterly lost himself in his thoughts. He stopped and sorted through the pages of his yellow folder.
It was becoming clear he was making this up as he went along, relying on broad strokes of ideas from the pages of his folder. There was no prepared text. He was not reading from the TelePrompTer.
A black emblem in the shape of Africa, with a white outline, was pinned to his robe and reflected light from his right chest. He began railing against the U.N.'s power structure, tilted toward the five permanent members of the U.N. Security Council.
He called the General Assembly "the parliament of the world" that should be dictating decisions to the Security Council. Gadhafi failed to note that his nation now holds a Security Council seat, though not a permanent veto-wielding one.
[snip]
(AP Photo/Richard Drew)
All of it: Gadhafi in grand UN performance - Yahoo! News
When will the Guardian and its commentators realize that global warming is a non-issue in the USA? Nobody is going to willingly see their jobs threatened for the sake of carbon emission reductions. Watch what happens to cap and trade. Watch what happens in Europe, too, as the costs of climate legislation become more manifest. (Hint: Australia). This issue is dead in the water, and you might as well get over it.
For the rest, the author displays an astonishing ignorance of US Constitutional history. The structuring of the Senate and the House were conscious, deliberate actions of the framers of the Constitution, precisely to insure the "checks and balances" that they were striving for.
The House is constructed according to population, and House members have a two-year term. Thus they are more likely to be influenced by public opinion and short-term trends - and indeed they are. They are, in fact, in permanent re-election mode, which is precisely why Obama's programs are in such trouble (54 Democratic congressmen come from demographically conservative districts that went for McCain.)
The Senate, by contrast, was deliberately set up to be the more conservative chamber. Not only are there two senators per state - thus nullifying the population advantages of the bigger states - but senators are elected for six year terms. The theory is that the individual Senator, safe for six years, need not be as swayed by short-term trends. What's more, the terms are staggered so that one third of the Senate comes up for re-election every two years, thus giving the body an infusion of new ideas (or at least, Senators who have had to be re-elected in face of current trends and issues).
It's all very conscious and purposeful, because gridlock was the utopia that the framers of the constitution were seeking in their fear of tyranny (tyranny of the majority, tyranny of minority, tyranny of short-term popular passions, etc.)
I am not suggesting that the author should have added dozens of paragraphs of constitutional history to this article, but to have demonstrated even a nodding acquaintance with the underlying forces would have been useful.
The earlier level of runaway enthusiasm for Obama was precisely the kind of short-term mania of which the framers of the Constitution were rightly suspicious. The growing disillusionment confirms the wisdom of their views.