Opinion: Libyan leader on Barack Obama
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Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi, who once called Ronald Reagan a ‘mad dog,’ had some unkind words for Barack Obama, too. As the Guardian reports, Gaddafi spoke in the classic manner of racists who claim they’re not racist:
‘We fear that Obama will feel that, because he is black with an inferiority complex, this will make him behave worse than the whites... This will be a tragedy [...] We tell him to be proud of himself as a black....’
But in Gaddafi’s comments -- he goes on to say ‘all Africa’ is behind Obama -- there is something like an Obama endorsement. Gaddafi was cited by the Bush administration as a sign of the war on terror’s success when Gaddafi, supposedly cowed by shock-and-awe, offered to open up Libya’s weapons program for inspection. (No matter that he’d offered to let inspectors in before the Iraq invasion.) Still, Gaddafi’s endorsement might be spinnable, like Hamas’ more fortright one, to suggest that Obama is soft on security and therefore favored by people on the receiving end of the big stick.
Now we just have to wonder when Osama bin Laden will chime in -- he waited till October in 2004, but at the pace tapes are going this year, maybe we can expect something sooner.