Notes From the U.N.

Favorite thing about Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad: He's at the forefront of the anti-necktie movement. Look at him speaking to the U.N. General Assembly today — he's up in front of all the world's leaders dressed in business casual! I bet he attends cabinet meetings in his pajamas and has been spotted at more than a few state dinners wearing nothing but his underpants.

Least favorite thing about Ahmadinejad: He cuts your tongue out if you mispronounce his last name.

Latest George W. Bush annoyance: Thanks to the last six years of Dubya's treating foreign affairs like a game of Risk, now I have to agree with leftist Venezuelan despot Hugo Chávez. Chávez called Bush "the Devil" in his speech to the U.N. — and by the way, I'd like to point out to all the rioting Muslims in the crowd how we Americans are able to have someone conflate our leader with a moralistic, religious portrait of evil and manage to not go around killing everyone and blowing shit up, and granted: we're about a bazillion times richer than you are and allowed to publicly mock our elected officials without getting thrown in jail and in many ways responsible for all the crap your country's been through, but still, knock it off already! — and while I don't the Bush is literally the devil (maybe Cheney is), he's certainly one of the devil's apprentices. But here's what Chávez said about Bush's speech: "He came to share his nostrums, to try to preserve the current pattern of domination, exploitation and pillage of the peoples of the world.... Wherever he looks, he sees extremists. He looks at your color, and he says, 'Oh, there’s an extremist.'" Well, duh. That's why we keep electing the jackass.

I can't say that I have any affection at all for Chávez... well, he hangs out with Cindy Sheehan, so that's a point for him and like negative twenty for her. But I think it's pretty clear that he's not the munificent bastard of the people that his image projects, and if he were in Bush's place and Venezuela in America's, he'd be just as corrupt, just as imperialist, and just as greedy as Dubya. While I know it's an act, I've got to respect him for cutting through the Bush administration's bullshit — and frankly, I wish there were a Western country that doesn't jail reporters or have ties to North Korea that I could respect instead, but their leaders are all too busy kissing Dubya's ass to call him out on Colin Powell's anthrax scare or the unilateral invasion of Iraq.