It has been quite a ride, watching the pop-political entertainment machine try to slice the Arab Spring into easy partisan talking points. Glenn Beck has his democracy-is-bad-for-Muslims, Google-is- pushing-dominos-to-the-caliphate theory. Sarah Palin came forward with a muddled call for more transparency from the White House, followed by a more direct shame-on-Obama-for-not-quickly- condemning-Libya-violence Facebook post, which came right before Obama condemned the violence after a delay to ensure the safety of U.S. citizens in Libya. There have been regular cries from the right, at CPAC in particular, that Obama cared more about betraying its ally Hosni Mubarak than confronting the Ayatollah of Iran. (This line of attack has been blunted by the fact that Obama has, in fact, been confronting the Ayatollah with regular statements, and the fact that few of the critics go so far as to actually side with Mubarak.) In the great middle of Republican thought--from Speaker John Boehner to Minority Leader Mitch McConnell to 2012 candidate-in-all-but-title Mitt Romney--there has been mostly silence. Send in Matt Drudge to keep the news cycle spinning. "GADDAFI: OBAMA IS A FRIEND," reads the banner headline on his eponymous website right now. The link goes to a year-old interview Gaddafi gave with a London-based newspaper, in which the Libyan autocrat said of the U.S. President, "He is someone I consider a friend. He knows he is a son of Africa. Regardless of his African belonging, he is of Arab Sudanese descent, or of Muslim descent. He is a man whose policy should be supported, and he should be assisted in implementing it in any way possible, since he is now leaning towards peace."
We can set aside, for the moment, whether anything said by a tyrant who has supported some of the most horrific moments in recent human history is credible. The question of how Gaddafi actually feels about Obama is a fascinating one, which is actually well described in the leaked State Department cables published by Wikileaks. In those cables, we see one of Gaddafi's sons complaining about a lack of support from the U.S., announcing he was "fed up" with his treatment by the Obama administration, and complaining that Muammar Gaddafi had been "embarrassed" on his last visit to New York by U.S. officials. This happened only months before Gaddafi publicly declared Obama a "friend."
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