Con dolcezza???

Ummmm, did someone switch the bodies of all members of the news media while I was sleeping restlessly last night? I was brimming with excitement about reading international reactions to Condoleeza Rice’s crazily inflammatory statements in Paris (I’d heard excerpts on NPR, and it sounded like she was threatening action in Iran (I remember an ominous “they know what they need to do.”) using exactly the language which led to preemptive action in Iraq); I just knew they were going to be in fine form, rabidly indignant, cool, haughty, suspicious. Why shouldn’t they be? Who trusts us?

And yet what, to my wondering eyes, should appear, but a virtual love-fest, with Ms. Rice at the center of a whole lot of good feeling. Everyone apparently loves Condi. ??? "After a long estrangement, Europe felt loved again," wrote a slightly ironic reporter. I mean, we find constant talk of Condi's charm, and suggestions like the one in the Guardian that "Washington's charm offensive has been broadly welcomed by European diplomats, particularly since the Iraq elections on January 30. " The same article reports that "Several French commentators have said they see clear signals that the Bush administration, for long happy to ignore the views of all who did not agree with it, was now determined to place improved transatlantic relations at the heart of the US president's second term. " Um, yea, right.

I know I'm exaggerating a little about the love-fest. An article in the Times at least characterizes the reviews as somewhat mixed, and reports on a few French journals that were still suspicious of her, inured to her charms. And the Guardian suggested that in the end her charm couldn't disguise the hardline politics she was espousing. But the best article on her Iran comments I found through Truthout, and I think I am primarily surprised by the fact that more was not made of remarks that give me an eerie sense of deja vous.

Thank goodness. Otherwise, Virtually Canada was seriously considering moving itself to an ever more virtual space, a pretend computer on a more ethereal internet, where such terribly permissive global attitudes could be eliminated with a simple neurological keystroke on the keyboard of panic-stricken, fevered imagination.