I’ve posted the transcript at my blog as well. I think it was a great and frankly overdue speech, if he can maintain the follow-through in spite of all the other distractions at home, Afghanistan, etc (I’ve been rather critical of Obama and praised Bush with regards to Africa policy before).
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All we’ve had for 2 and 1/2 years are speeches and teleprompters and outrageous spending and governmental intrusion into every aspect of our daily life personally and commercially.
Now McK, that’s not entirely fair. We’ve seen more. We’ve also had our foreign policy become the World Apology Tour, and we’ve seen our President side with tyrants and dictators over people struggling for freedom, and we’ve seen the administration openly pursue the criminalization of policy differences.
We have to give credit where it is due.
Well, I don’t want to say anything untoward to our host, Aziz, but the last time he pulled this word puzzle stuff, Khameini, the iranian, ended up looking like an democrat altar boy.
And, I thought Obama had a lock on that scenario.
It just goes to show you how far most democrats have deteriorated.
http://deanesmay.com/2009/06/19/khameneis-khutbah/
I have a great deal of sympathy for any American President (or British Prime Minister, or almost any other world leader with an interest in Africa) looking at Africa as a whole and seriously considering just hiding his head under a pillow and hoping it will go away.
I’m not being critical, or even entirely humorous: anyone who’s spent much time really looking at that continent knows that “mess” doesn’t even begin to describe it. While there are bright rays of hope here and there, and there has been progress in some areas, it often appears to basically be one horror story after another. On food, medicine, irrigation, sanitation, government, business, crime, corruption, human rights: you could practically just randomly throw a dart at a map of Africa and find at least three of those running at a rate of horror nearly unimaginable in most of the rest of the world.
I won’t even go into how much damage I think our totally wrongheaded approach to AIDS on the continent has done.
If Turkey was “The Sick Man of Europe” at one time, Africa as a whole is the Sick Man of the World. Who’s at fault for that is almost irrelevant; how to help it get fixed is the real problem.
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