ABOVE: Anne Applebaum
Only a few hours after I called the Washington Post a “halfway house for disgraced neocons,” Fred Hiatt and his merry band of nitwits published an Op-Ed by Anne Applebaum, totally discrediting my claim that WaPo was a halfway house for discredited neocons by demonstrating, once and for all, that the newspaper is instead a lunatic bin of delusional neocons. So, I hereby apologize to all halfway houses for disgraced neocons for maliciously comparing them to the Washington Post.
The point of Applebaum’s Op-Ed is that the liberal MSM is hiding from the public the millions of foreigners who are appalled at the election of Obama:
You’ve probably heard stories of swooning foreign reporters, breathless international coverage, fawning headlines in many languages. … Yet there was another, more negative category of foreign response to Obama’s inauguration … . A number of international observers eschewed the general adulation and concluded, simply, that the entire event — the election, the inauguration — was a hoax.
Well, this should be interesting. Let’s see what foreigners Applebaum — who incidentally speaks eleventy-billion point eight six foreign languages as fluently as if they were all her mother tongue — finds to support this claim that a “number of international observers eschewed the general adulation.”
Her first example knocks it out of the park. It’s an article from the English-language version of Pravda.ru, claiming that Obama was put in place by the Republicans as a “scapegoat,” that his term will end early, and that the Republicans will then replace him with their real pick. Of course, the English language Pravda.ru is the respected bellwether of Russian opinion which, on its pages, brings you things like this:
And my personal favorite:
Then Applebaum has a Chinese academic cited in a blog citing another blog saying that
many of his compatriots were confident that the “impossible” election of Obama would be disrupted by “something dramatic, similar to John F. Kennedy’s assassination.”
I’m not so sure why Applebaum sees this as a criticism of Obama but, hey, if you’re manufacturing shit out of whole cloth, you have to go to work with the cloth you have.
But the last foreign critic Applebaum cites is the best:
Al-Qaeda has been looking to discredit President Obama, too, mostly with nasty insults (he’s a “hypocrite,” a “killer,” even a “house Negro”) but also describing him as a front man for the secret Zionist conspiracy. “This is Obama,” said Ayman al-Zawahiri, the group’s No. 2, “whom the American machine of lies tried to portray as the rescuer who will change the policy of America.”
I thought criticism of someone by Al Qaeda was a good thing, particularly from a neocon’s point of view, but apparently Al Qaeda were the only other folks Applebaum could find to support her case that significant numbers of foreigners didn’t like Obama. The question is, after reviewing the current composition of Op-Ed contributors at the WaPo, is there anyone too stupid not to get an offer of column space from Hiatt?
