This is a headline over an article in today's Financial Times.
So is the president a masochist? Does he think that he will not rebuffed by the real powers at the United Nations which happen to be Russia and China at the Security Council and the mob of proto-states in the General Assembly?
Here's how the FT correspondent on the East River, Harvey Morris, sees it: "Barack Obama will cement the new co-operative relationship between the US and the United Nations this month when he becomes the first American president to chair its 15-member Security Council."
And here's how Susan Rice, Obama's emissary to the sinkhole, so blandly puts it: "The council has a very important role to play in preventing the spread and use of nuclear weapons, and it's the world's principal body for dealing with global security co-operation." Has she not been reading the newspapers in the last two decades?
I now grasp a significant something about her hiring of underlings at the big glass tower. They dare not have an ounce of skepticism about what the tout va bien folk still think is the last hope for mankind. As it happens, the U.N.'s most extensive activity is conferences and at once dismally dull but still destructive papers prepared for each and every one of these jamborees. The year of the woman, the year of the child, blah, blah, blah.
Mr. Morris writes that "the annual meeting of world leaders is this year raising expectations on a number of fronts." Don't believe me. Just wait. They will not be gratified or satisfied.
But Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is coming, and apparently the State Department is trying to blackball him from some New York hotel. Muammar Gaddahi is also scheduled to arrive in New York soon. And "a public outcry...has already stymied his plans to pitch his tent in Central Park." How unfriendly!
And just when the president is trying to commune with these bastards.