Real Foreign Affairs Experience

Its been a few weeks since dudeweekend took Barack Obama into their tender mouths so I guess we're overdue. As loyal readers of dudeweekend (all one of them) will know, we have relentlessly hated on the pantsuited monster for all manner of her bullshit. But the one issue that really sticks in my crawl is this whole recent line of attack that she has more foreign policy experience than Obama owing to her time as first lady. Anyone with half a brain knows this is ridiculous even without Hillary lying to them about snipers and ducking for cover. But lately Barack Obama put his finger on another really important point. He said

"When Senator Clinton brags 'I've met leaders from eighty countries'--I know what those trips are like! I've been on them. You go from the airport to the embassy. There's a group of children who do native dance. You meet with the CIA station chief and the embassy and they give you a briefing. You go take a tour of a plant that [with] the assistance of USAID has started something. And then--you go."

This is exactly right. It reminds me of a dipshit I see at meetings all around DC of assorted Very Important People. He is always shooting his mouth off about "the situation" in Iraq or somesuch, always bragging about what he knows, who he knows, and how he knows it, how his information is much better than yours, because you dont have the "sources" he does. Honest to god, I was at a meeting where he challenged a quite senior defense department official and insinuated that the official was being played because Mr. Dipshit's "sources" in that country had told him something different. This type of crap is why I hate DC.

This type of stinking asshole is actually pretty common in DC. Its the guy who jets into a country, takes a limo past the stinking slums and narrow alleyways, checks in to his 5 star hotel, goes downstairs to the conference center and attends a seminar with assorted government bigwigs (all of whom speak English and wear nice suits), then on the way back up to his hotel room he stops and asks the bellhop "so what do you think about X?" And then the douchebag gets in his limo, goes to the airport, and goes home, where he tells everyone who will listen what the mood on "the street" in said country is.

Which brings me back to Barry O. If youve read his autobiography (and really, there is no excuse if you havent) you'll know that Obama has actually spent time in a foreign country. Not 3 nights in a five star hotel with a post-conference dinner at the attached Ruth's Chris, but living in a sprawling Indonesian suburb, a dusty African capital, or a teeming South Asian metropolis. This is real knowledge of foreign affairs, tangible knowledge of how people think and act in different contexts, based on rationales sunk deep into cultural and social networks. This is the polar opposite of Hillary Clinton and her "knowledge" of foreign affairs, filled as it is with obsequious foreign officials, scheming businessmen, and slick spokesmen, people who have more in common with her philandering husband than they do with their countrymen who work at the fucking noodle stand down the road.

Its this superficial, wishful thinking type of "knowledge" that leads people to argue that "we will, in fact, be greeted as liberators" in Iraq or that Hamas can't be popularly elected because, hey, Mahmoud Abbas and all of his cronies speak English and drink whiskey, and we like them, so obviously the Palestinian people should also. With a few exceptions, this is the knowledge of the Bush Administration. Its the knowledge of McCain and Clinton as well.