Talk radio noticed, but the networks did not. During his long-winded speech to the United Nations on Wednesday, Libyan dictator Moammar Gadhafi proclaimed "We are content and happy if Obama can stay forever as the president of the United States of America...The American presidents used to say to us, they shall terrorize us....What our son Obama said is completely different today." The Washington Post noted these remarks on page 8 Thursday morning, but the only broadcast network correspondent to give a whole story to Gadhafi, ABC’s Dan Harris, left it out of his Good Morning America report Thursday:
HARRIS: Gadhafi certainly didn't do anything to ingratiate himself in this long, bizarre speech to the U.N. General Assembly either. Wearing an elaborate brown robe and a shiny pin in the shape of Africa, and reading from hand-scrawled notes on scraps of paper, he tossed a copy of the U.N. Charter, blamed the H1N1 swine flu virus on an unnamed foreign military.
TRANSLATOR: It was meant from the beginning to be used as a military weapon.
HARRIS: Complained about having jet lag.
TRANSLATOR: All of you are tired, having jet lag.
HARRIS: And referred to President Obama as "my son."
TRANSLATOR: My son, Obama, said that this is a historical one.
HARRIS: In the audience, the representative from Cameroon was rubbing his eyes. And a Chinese representative was laughing. As the speech continued, with spittle flying out of his mouth at one point, Gadhafi defended the Taliban and the Somali pirates and implicated the Israelis in the assassination of JFK. At one point, the exhausted interpreter was replaced by a fresh one.
According to the Post, Gadhafi compared the Taliban to the Vatican: "If Taliban wants to make a religious state, okay, like the Vatican. Vatican doesn’t constitute a danger against us? No, it’s a religious country, very peaceful. And if Taliban wants to make an Islamic emirate, who said that the Taliban is an enemy?"
