MSMs (reprise)

It’s double standard time again and a great opportunity to witness how the pack mentality leads to suspension of all the supposedly sacrosanct rules. How many sordid autocrats and sleazebags of one sort or another parade through Columbia University’s overrated international affairs school every September during UN week without stirring much of a ripple? Can we imagine anyone being rude to, say, an important Saudi prince for his country’s harboring the appalling Idi Amin for two decades?

Pretty much anyone holding down the presidential sash can and does get a hearing up there, with nothing more than an occasional heckler slipping through to be immediately shushed by the august dons. You’d need something like the entire Burmese junta in full-dress uniform wearing shades and human ears as necklaces to interrupt the devotion to polite power-worship and realpolitik.

But all that goes out the window when the country and our tabloid MSM have decided on an enemy’s list as occurred when Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad got a platform to speak at Columbia. The big guns were out and threatening retaliation against the school, and voila the university’s president himself was there to insult him personally beforehand.

Ahmadinejad is a major creep and deserves what he gets, but officially introducing him as ‘ridiculous’ and ‘ignorant’ is just grandstanding. The fact that Ahmadinejad subjected himself to such treatment suggests to me that the mullahs he fronts for are seriously cut off from reality and have had retainers fawning on them for far too long.

The whole scene took me back to a speech I heard at the National Press Club in Washington years ago when a certain Ariel Sharon came to town after the most recent conquest of Lebanon. Sharon hadn’t yet been found complicit in the Sabra and Chatila refugee camp massacres—that would come later—but they had just occurred and were certainly fair grist for some journalistic queries.

But the crowd was so enchanted with the wisecracking Israeli general that the 100-strong audience merely chuckled at his jokes and enjoyed a bountiful lunch. His dubious war record didn’t even come up. No official censorship or boardroom conspiracies were necessary to keep Washington's entire MainStream Media quiet. Somehow, they just knew.

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Twilight Highlights: Speaking of MSM, Mahmoud should look up Larry (‘I’m not gay’) Craig while he’s here. Ahmadinejad replied to the question about executions of teenaged boys for homosexual acts by saying ‘gays’ didn’t exist in Iran. I suspect he’s right as far as that goes—public hanging would put a damper on the coming-out process. Craig did his best to suppress the public expression of homosexuality too even while allegedly making whoopy in toilets. They both have too much faith in appearances, including their own. I’d bet money that the underground gay scene in Teheran is torrid, despite or because of the dangers. And if experience is any guide, Ahmadinejad will have a couple of closet-case homophobes among his own enforcers. Like the old saw about left and right bending backwards and touching each other, these twisted theocrats don’t realize how much they have in common. God help us if they ever become allies.