Quote for the Day

"I remember a time when, following an event of international significance, the world would wait to hear what the president of the United States had to say about it. In Britain we would have an impatient few hours before America had woken up. Because until the President had spoken, you couldn't be sure of even the shape of what might happen next.

On Monday we woke to the news of North Korea's nuclear test, and to a banal commentary of people who didn't really know what to say about it. Just when you wanted some real insight and even facts, the [BBC radio] Today programme again indulged its tiresome obsession with Iraq, focusing upon whether Tony Blair's actions there had made this move by Kim Jong Il more likely blah blah. That didn't surprise me. What did was my instinctive reaction when George W. Bush did speak much later in the day. There he was gravely intoning on one or other news channel that this "constitutes a threat to international peace and security", and "Oh sod off" I heard myself muttering, with no desire to hear any more. It was as much ennui as irritation: I didn’t believe he would have anything useful to say and found it faintly annoying that he spoke as though the world would care.

One reaction from a completely insignificant voice in the political process. Yet it reveals, I think, a sad truth: the 43rd President of the United States of America has squandered the political authority of a great country," - Alice Miles, The Times of London.