Moammar Gadhafi’s debut speech before the United Nations’ General Assembly Tuesday wasn’t the longest in that esteemed body’s history; that dubious record is held by Fidel Castro who clocked in at over four hours back in 1960. Still, the Libyan dictator’s disjointed dirge was long enough restless delegates could have easily slipped out for a Reuben at the Carnegie Deli and a sightseeing bus tour and returned with time to spare.
Of course, who would want to miss the rambling rant , in which, Gadhafi–in his first U.N. appearance after forty years in power–opined that swine flu might have been the result of a military experiment gone awry; and dismissed the General Assembly as little more that a debating society, comparing it with the famed Speaker’s Corner in London’s Hyde Park, where anyone with a big mouth can get on a soap box and seek an audience? “You make a speech and disappear. You are like decor,” Gadhafi said through one of two translators( Gadhafi, who spoke in Arabic, went on so long a tag team was necessary).The only members who have any real power, he contended, are those on the Security Council, specifically the five permanent veto-wielding members: the United States, Britain, France, Russia and China.
Most U.N. speeches are supposed to last about fifteen minutes, give or take. But Gadhafi droned on for ninety-eight odd minutes. He had, after all, forty years of valuable info and insights to share with the powerless assembly. He discussed his sleeping habits; offered a bizarre theory of Israel’s involvement in JFK’s assassination; and equated the Taliban with the Vatican. He also railed against the United Nations saying, “Sixty-five aggressive wars took place without any collective action by the United Nations to prevent them,” since the body was created in 1945.
He did have praise for one man: President Obama. Calling the President a “young Kenyan,” he said it would be wonderful ” if Obama could be President of the United States forever.”
Such laudatory words this president doesn’t need. Obama, who had addressed the Assembly earlier and long left the room, and the White House surely cringed at such a cockamamie compliment. While most people will easily dismiss Gadhafi’s ravings as just that, I can think of at least one person who delighted in the crazy dictator’s description of Obama. Orly Taitz, the grandmama of that wackadoodle ‘Birther’ movement must have dropped the latest phony Kenyan birth certificate she had been working on, and erupted into a celebratory jig.
Those of us in the New York area are accustomed to the annual rolling out of the red carpet for legitimate and rogue leaders alike, along with the traffic gridlock and extra security that always accompanies this week in September.
“When you have the United nations here, you have to expect the crazy clowns to come out and make fools of themselves,” James Carville said on CNN. True enough, I guess. But crazy talk is rarely heard in a vacuum. We certainly don’t need to fuel our own home-grown crazies with additional erroneous ammo.
Of course there may have been some logic in the middle of Gadhafi’s loquacious lunacy. He went on for so long quite simply because after the speech was over he had nowhere to go. I’m not sure if anyone outside of New York is familiar with Gadhafi’s infamous tent flap. Here are the basics: shortly after the Pan Am bomber, greeted with a hero’s welcome, returned to Libya, residents of Englewood Cliffs, NJ pitched a fit over the dictator’s intent to pitch his tent on the grounds of the Libyan embassy there. Then plans were announced to erect the structure ( we’re not, by the way, talking about a Boy Scout tent, but a Bedouin-style luxury tent replete with amenities ad a satellite hook-up) in Central Park. No go; NYC officials nixed the notion.
Last Tuesday word quickly spread through my home county of Westchester in suburban New York, that the tent would take up temporary residence on a sprawling estate, owned by Donald Trump, in the tony town of Bedford. The follicley flamboyant real estate mogul, usually an eager media hog, has been conspicuously absent from the airwaves. His office merely issued a statement that the property had been “rented to Middle Eastern partners.”
After a frantic scramble that included calls from local congress reps Nita Lowey and John Hall to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton (who owns a house in nearby Chappaqua), with reminders that many of the victims of Pan Am flight 103 in 1988 had come from New York, officials in Bedford and Westchester County searched for ways to legally bar the tent. Bingo. They found one: no one had applied for the necessary permits to erect the structure. And so, the tent came down before it was officially up. And long before the demented dictator could cross the county line.
Throughout the kerfuffle I kept thinking, why doesn’t they guy just get a hotel room? I mean New York City’s got a bunch of them. Some are even pretty famous and swanky. Surely one rivals the luxury of Gadhafi’s portable suite. What I didn’t know: the dictator has a hardcore elevator phobia. Okay, but come on, there has to be one ground floor cozy closet of a room somewhere on the island of Manhattan. If not, I know there’s a secure little cell on nearby scenic Rikers Island that would provide appropriate accommodations for a man of Gadhafi’s stature and reputation.
From what I heard, Gadhafi apparently settled in at the Libyan embassy in Manhattan( there are apparently as many embassies as spellings of his last name), presumably on the ground floor.
Time to pack up and go home, Moammar. For now, you’re done being part of the local decor. But I’m afraid you’ll be back. To star in your own reality show, ” Six Degrees of a Dictator” featuring unwitting co-stars Donald Trump and Orly Taitz.
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Another great article by Amy Beth – didn’t know that Ghadafi had an elevator phobia – interesting???? Now that he annoyed so many people in the area let him go home and stay there. Maybe we will be lucky enough not to hear from him for another 40 years.