Blog Watch: Paging Miss Manners

In yesterday’s column, Maureen Dowd upbraided Lee Bollinger for being so rude to his honored guest, the president of Iran. The Eternal Hope blog sides with MoDo and sees this sort of rude behavior emanating from the bad example we have in the White House:

And given how Bush has a way of humiliating people in public, it is hardly surprising that minions like Lee Bollinger did the same by humiliating Ahmedinejad when he went to give a speech to the students at the University of Columbia. The Jewish protests against the Iranian leader for his holocaust denial were completely called for. But for a university president to embarrass him the way he did was totally unprofessional. Bollinger is supposed to be representing his university, not his own personal feelings about Ahmedinejad. His humiliation of the Iranian leader said more about his selfish behavior and reflected much more on his institution than it did about Ahmedinejad.

Mark Finkelstein of NewsBusters mentions that Mika Brzezinski read from the MoDo column on the air. Finkelstein then cites Tucker Carlson as pointing out that The Man In The Dinner Jacket is no charm school graduate:

I like Tucker Carlson's take on the matter. On his show last night, he laughed at the notion, pointing out that it was this same Iran that engaged in the worst breach of hospitality in recent history: holding American diplomats hostage for over a year during the Carter administration. Oh, and who is accused of being one of the hostage-holding thugs? None other, of course, than that sensitive guy himself, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.

Perhaps we can get an etiquette expert to help with how best to introduce a holocaust-denying homophobic zealot.