Well, it will be damn hard to ignore the vapidity of Hatoyama Yukio's article for the magazine Voice, now that The New York Times has reprinted the Christian Science Monitor's translation on its op-ed page.
I am not sure the "Just-ignore-what-the-essay-says-it-is-only-meant-for-domestic-consumption-and-contains-a-lot-of-code-phrases-that can only be understood-in-the-context-of-Japanese-election-propaganda-and-in-Japan-nobody-believes-anything-printed-especially-when-the-author's-stringing-together-of-platitudinous-utterances-makes-him-sound-like-he-is-stoned" defense is going to work anymore. The damn thing is out of the box now, getting quoted and analyzed.
Later - Reader DS writes in with the report that Hatoyama's essay is only available online or in the newsprint version of the Internationl Herald Tribune. It was not printed in the paper version of The New York Times in the United States. I would feel somewhat relieved...except that the essay was earlier featured on the home page of The Huffington Post, where it attracted the adulation of the "when I hear the word 'globalization' I reach for my Browning" crowd.
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Fortunately for Hatoyama, though, the bar for statemanship isn't as high as it used to be any more. He still sounds better than Bush.
Hatoyama's just doing a Blair. Blair, he was the first British Prime Minister to address the French Parliament (or whatever they have) in French, and he talked of distancing Britain from the overbearing Yanks in favour of the sophisticates of Europe - then along came Iraq and Pious George and it was back to lapdog status. Same this side of the Pacific, methinks.
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