Tuesday, Boston, Massachusetts

It was high drama yesterday in New York when Columbia University President Lee Bollinger, using his “introduction” of the controversial President of Iran, blitzed Mahmoud Ahmadinejad with accusations of his character, intelligence and his litany of bone headed statements.

Calling him a petty dictator guilty of executions and the absurd denial of the Jewish holocaust in Germany, he intimated that the Iranian leader was uneducated, evil and too much of a coward to answer these accusations directly. In a mere fifteen minutes he verbally boiled the little dictator in oil!

When his own time at the microphone came Ahmadinejad protested the insulting comments in the introduction. He then went on to sermonize about freedom and intellectual curiosity but, as predicted did not answer the charges leveled at him. And his penchant for ludicrous statements continued. The best was probably when he asserted, with a straight face, that there are no homosexuals in Iran. Say What!?

I suppose Ahmadinejad deserves some credit for his willingness to face the hostility of the American public. But the impression he left was of a limited mind with distorted ideas. He proved to be just what we heard - a cruel, posturing little puppet with idiotic ideas. I can’t imagine that the Iranian clergy, who actually call the shots there, were not slapping their foreheads in disgust watching their President’s performance in New York.

Bravo to the Columbia President who got the rare opportunity to blister the Iranian toad right to his face. No one else in the government has gotten the chance to do that. Maybe the visit was a good idea after all. Frankly I enjoyed watching Mahmoud Ahmadinejad get nailed.