Looking for a quick and easy boost in the polls, President Obama has decided to go to the one place where merit bears no relationship to adulation: the United Nations. On September 24, the president will take the unprecedented step of presiding over a meeting of the UN Security Council.
No American president has ever attempted to acquire the image of King of the Universe by officiating at a meeting of the UN’s highest body. But Obama apparently believes that being flanked by council-member heads of state like Col. Moammar Qaddafi — who is expected to be seated five seats to Obama’s right — will cast a sufficiently blinding spell on the American taxpayer that the perilous state of the nation’s economy, the health-care fiasco, and a summer of “post-racial” scapegoating will pale by comparison.
After all, who among us is not for world peace?
Yes, yes, the president will enter the Star Wars bar to rally the sainted international community around that lofty goal getting rid of nuclear weapons (a goal which is, for the president, conveniently too distant to be judged on in three years).
But the president is forgetting that old saying to never wrestle with a pig—you get dirty and the pig likes it.
Or several pigs in this case.