Standing tall

Obama stays vague on chlorinated chickens.

Steven Erlanger of the New York Times, scrabbling for an On The Other Hand graf on Obama’s triumphal European tour (my italics):

Obama was vague on crucial issues of trade, defense and foreign policy that currently divide Washington from Europe and are likely to continue to do so even if Obama becomes president. The issues include Russia, Turkey, Iran and Afghanistan, as well as new refueling tankers and chlorinated chickens, the focus of an 11-year European ban on U.S. poultry imports.

So American electors have to choose between two candidates: one doesn’t know the difference between Shia and Sunni Muslims, but it doesn’t matter because he plans to pick fights with both. The other doesn’t stand tall in defence of chlorinated chickens.

Nailbiting stuff.

Author: James Wimberley

James Wimberley (b. 1946, an Englishman raised in the Channel Islands. three adult children) is a former career international bureaucrat with the Council of Europe in Strasbourg. His main achievements there were the Lisbon Convention on recognition of qualifications and the Kosovo law on school education. He retired in 2006 to a little white house in Andalucia, His first wife Patricia Morris died in 2009 after a long illness. He remarried in 2011. to the former Brazilian TV actress Lu Mendonça. The cat overlords are now three. I suppose I've been invited to join real scholars on the list because my skills, acquired in a decade of technical assistance work in eastern Europe, include being able to ask faux-naïf questions like the exotic Persians and Chinese of eighteenth-century philosophical fiction. So I'm quite comfortable in the role of country-cousin blogger with a European perspective. The other specialised skill I learnt was making toasts with a moral in the course of drunken Caucasian banquets. I'm open to expenses-paid offers to retell Noah the great Armenian and Columbus, the orange, and university reform in Georgia. James Wimberley's occasional publications on the web