Summer Travel Plans
By GAIL COLLINS
NYT
Barack Obama is visiting ... wherever. (Security is so tight for this trip that we cannot even talk about not talking about it.)
Suffice it to say that he intends to check out the big Middle Eastern trouble spots, to meet with officials and generals, and to speak with ordinary citizens to the degree possible for a man surrounded by more armor than a Transformer movie.
“I think he wants to get out and do as much as he can ... I don’t think he’ll be strolling around the market in a flak jacket,” said Susan Rice, a senior Obama foreign policy adviser, speaking from a plane en route to ... someplace.
That was, of course, a reference to John McCain’s visit to Baghdad last year when he strolled through a market, swaddled in a flak jacket and protected by so many soldiers, helicopters and sharpshooters that it looked like a new invasion. The entire expedition provided as much information on real-life conditions in Iraq as a walk down the old “Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves” set at Universal Studios. Nevertheless, McCain declared that he was witnessing evidence that the country was returning to normal. The next day, a number of Shiite workers from the market were murdered.
McCain, who had been demanding that Obama visit Iraq, is now denouncing him for not having gone sooner, more often and before making policy speeches on the Middle East. “He’s never been to Afghanistan and I’m astonished,” he added.
(Continued here.)
NYT
Barack Obama is visiting ... wherever. (Security is so tight for this trip that we cannot even talk about not talking about it.)
Suffice it to say that he intends to check out the big Middle Eastern trouble spots, to meet with officials and generals, and to speak with ordinary citizens to the degree possible for a man surrounded by more armor than a Transformer movie.
“I think he wants to get out and do as much as he can ... I don’t think he’ll be strolling around the market in a flak jacket,” said Susan Rice, a senior Obama foreign policy adviser, speaking from a plane en route to ... someplace.
That was, of course, a reference to John McCain’s visit to Baghdad last year when he strolled through a market, swaddled in a flak jacket and protected by so many soldiers, helicopters and sharpshooters that it looked like a new invasion. The entire expedition provided as much information on real-life conditions in Iraq as a walk down the old “Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves” set at Universal Studios. Nevertheless, McCain declared that he was witnessing evidence that the country was returning to normal. The next day, a number of Shiite workers from the market were murdered.
McCain, who had been demanding that Obama visit Iraq, is now denouncing him for not having gone sooner, more often and before making policy speeches on the Middle East. “He’s never been to Afghanistan and I’m astonished,” he added.
(Continued here.)
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