What a farce

Interesting watching the news on Germany's "ZDF" this evening. There they were at the French/German border; Merkel, Obama, Sarkozy, Brown and one or two others and Silvio Berlusconi arrives, chatting on his mobile, gets out of the car and signals to everyone that he is busy chatting and they will all have to wait. However, it transpires that Silvio wasn't being impolite and, according to the Italian Foreign Ministry, he was just having a wee chat with the Turkish prime minister, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, to help convince him to accept the Danish prime minister, Anders Fogh Rasmussen, as the next NATO General Secretary. Turkey's opposition to having Rasmussen is because of his defence of Danish newspaper cartoons depicting Muhammad in 2005.(1) One really wonders what planet all of these people inhabit and I mean all of them. There was Angie grinning, standing on a red carpet, supposedly waiting for Silvio who was having a telephone conversation with Erdogan who is supposedly still sulking, when in actual fact he is trying to use the appointment of the new NATO General Secretary to gain political capital, and there we all were watching television, witnessing this, with Angie grinning like a cheshire cat, Barack laughing and joking with Nicholas and Gordon. Well, maybe I am getting upset about nothing but somehow it all seems really difficult to take these people seriously and while they were having their "serious" talks all the wives and Angies hubby were having a little programme of their own, no doubt, at some distance from the right back of the Rhine where the demonstrators against the whole charade were burning down a couple of buildings. In some ways we really haven't come very far in the last couple of thousand years.
1 http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2009/apr/04/europe-troops-afghanistan-nato-obama
2 ibid