-- Pruttiporn Kerdchoochuen
In the spirit of my imaginary chain-smoking, heavy-drinking Scouser grandma (don't we all have one of those?), let me lead off by saying, "Ah, 'as a good 'ead on 'is shoulders, tha' Barack." I think that sums up, more or less, the new President's speech in Cairo. A lot of what he said was nothing new, really. Promoting cross-cultural understanding, emphasizing Islam's integral role in world (and especially Western) progress and appealing to moderate Muslims, he repeats the words spoken, written, taught, and sometimes screamed in frustration (with a lot of hand wringing and hair pulling) by a significant number of people that went all but unheeded in the past eight years. In short, he was presenting a policy of commonsense toward the Islamic world, that felt as invigorating and reassuring after eight years of craziness as a simple American moo cow fucking burger (thank you, Lewis Black) would to an American tongue returning from a sojourn in the East. And let's face it - your brain was probably sighing with as much relief as mine to be hearing, at long last, a President who can actually string together complex sentences and coherent ideas and who manages to sound dignified, smart, and not like he had been out all night drinking moonshine and running his head into a brick wall for Dick Cheney's pleasure.
Let's toast to diplomacy and human rights values. It's been a while. Cheers.
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