Bobble Heads: Collect the Whole Set ...At Your Own Peril

First, a little catch-up business. 

If you are one of the many readers who have sent comments over the course of the last few months and have either had trouble sending them through, or never saw them posted, my sincerest apologies. It would seem comments were not routing correctly and I was not seeing them at all. I thought no one cared. Au contraire! Well over a hundred comments flooded my in box on Friday, magically appearing with a simple email from Blogger: 

You have been invited to receive email notifications at xxxxxxx@gmail.com when comments on blog The Wifely Person Speaks need to be moderated.  

Please click the Subscribe link below to accept this invitation. If you don’t want these email notifications, you can just ignore this message, or click the Decline link below. 

I checked, and this setting has never been changed on Blogger, and I have no idea why they stopped sending me notices, much less putting the comments in the WAITING FOR APPROVAL folder on my dashboard. But all the comments have been read, sorted, and posted to the right episode. So, if for any reason you stopped writing, please resume. 

For my next trick, I want to know if anyone else suspects the Canada-Saudi Arabia kerfuffle is somehow related to our 45th president. 

The original tweet condemning the Saudi government for the arrest and detention of Samar Badawi, sister of human rights activist and also Saudi prisoner Raif Badawi, was no more radical than any of the other global tweets condemning Saudi Arabian human rights abuses:

Canada is gravely concerned about additional arrests of civil society and women’s rights activists in Saudi Arabia, including Samar Badawi.

We urge the Saudi authorities to immediately release them and all other peaceful human rights activists.

There were a number of responding tweets, but this, with theme and variation,is my personal favorite:

In Saudi Arabia we feel worried about Canada committing cultural genocide against Indigenous people. We also support the right of Quebec to become an independent nation.

The resulting hissy-fit saw the Canadian ambassador expelled from Saudi Arabia, and all Saudi students studying in Canada have been called home. Really? Who are you punishing?

Working on a reservation to Riyadh with one of my clients today, I asked how excited he was to be going back to Saudi Arabia for the first time in over a year. Knowing how much he enjoyed the last sojourn, I was taken aback by his answer:

Not real excited. I'm really Canadian. My wife is US born, and I have dual citizenship. These days, I've been flying internationally on my Canadian passport, but not this trip. So check to make sure it doesn't show up in the record. 

We had had this conversation once before, and I remembered him saying it didn't' matter which one he used. This time, however, being Canadian would've barred him from travel to Riyadh. Without my asking, he added:

This whole thing is a pretty stupid over-reaction. I don't get it. I wanna know who's driving this bus.

Ralph Kramden

It ain't Ralph Kramden, that's fer sure. And that's when I started thinking about this. Back in Mr. Ambruso's 6th grade class, we were learning about geopolitics...only we didn't call it that back then. We called it history and geography. We were learning about the Allies and the Axis, and who aligned with whom. On the blackboard he drew a line at the top and a line down. On the top left, he wrote: THE ALLIES; on the other side, he wrote, THE AXIS. Someone laughed and said  it should be THE GOOD GUYS and THE BAD GUYS. Mr. Ambruso said no, we can't label things like that because GOOD and BAD are subjective. That's where I learned that word. BIG one. Stuck with me forever. And he was right....sorta. 

However, if you look at that chart and compare it to a more modern chart, there are some  blatant, and very subjective moral equivalencies worth noting:

The list on the left is a combination of democracies, emerging democracies, and constitutional monarchies...except for the last two. How they got on the right-side of the list is beyond me. On the right, however, are some pretty well recognized and established 20th century dictatorships. 

I suppose one must now ask, with whom is the US aligning itself and who is being rejected? Russia and North Korea are welcomed with open arms, while most of Europe is being actively shut out. Who are our allies, anyway? And who are the wanna-be dictators? That may be the most important question of all. However.....

The tariff wars, the meetings with Kim Jong Un, the huggy-bear-kissy-face routine with Putin....where is all going? And how much behind the scenes manipulation is setting up guys like Netanyahu and Prince Mohammed bin Salman for continuing their questionable human rights policies. 

On August 8th, 2018, Robin Wright wrote in the NEW YORKER:

President Trump’s support, and a personal connection to Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner, may have caused M.B.S. to feel that he has impunity to do as he pleases on the global stage. Trump’s first stop on his inaugural foreign trip as President was in Saudi Arabia, a visit orchestrated—with much fanfare—by the crown prince. Unlike the government in Canada, the Trump Administration has shied away from invoking human-rights issues with the Saudis, despite a graphic State Department report, released in April, detailing the sweeping scope of violations in the kingdom. The section on Saudi Arabia in the State Department’s 2017 Human Rights Report runs long—more than fifty pages. It cites the most significant abuses as torture; arbitrary arrest; unlawful killings; execution without requisite due process; restrictions on freedom of expression, religion, and peaceful assembly; trafficking in persons; violence and discrimination against women; criminalization of same-sex sexual activity; and the inability of its people to choose a government through free and fair elections.

I suspect Prince Mohammed bin Salman belongs in the left-side column despite some of  his progressive ideas....like permitting women to drive. That act does not negate human rights violations. In fact, when you're doing this progressive thing at the same time you're cranking down on your citizens' right of free speech while simultaneously bombing civilians in Yemen, you are sending a whole bunch of conflicting messages. Of course, when your power-broker buddies, the UAE, the Palestinian Authority, and Bahrain, announce they will stand shoulder-to-shoulder with Saudi Arabia against anyone who criticized The Kingdom, you know the world has just gotta be shaking in its sandals. 

Who wins? I'm not sure. We are, yet again, bystanders watching Kitty Genovese's murder. No skin in the game...or is there? The people of Saudi Arabia? Definitely not; they are quite certain which side is up. The arms dealers? Yep, they benefit by silence. Hell, even the Canadians were selling arms to the Kingdom. Anyone want to guess?

Prince Mohammed bin Salman
Don't let the face fool you

I'll take a stab. This is attempt for 45 to call the shots on something, anything. He tells Prince Mohammed bin Salman to punish the Canadians, not because they tweeted something really innocuous about the Saudi government, but because Feckless Leader is mad at Trudeau. This dick-waving adventure is to give the prince some street-creds in the western world, at the same time creating a pathetic plan to annoy Canada. Truth be told, is so be-mad-at-Canada-because-I-am kinda second-grade thinking that it's a total joke and instead of jumping up and down, people are openly laughing at the absurdity of that interaction. The only one who stood to remotely gain, would be.....no one.

Whatever the genesis of this nonsense, it is not innocent, it is not what it seems, and it just adds another would-be-despot to the list aligning with our president. I am certain beyond a shadow of a doubt that Prince Mohammed bin Salman is yet another collectible bobble-head in the oval office. And every damn one of these could get your butt tossed into the clink sooner or later.
He's working on the set. You know that, right?

The Wifely Person's Tip o'the Week

Go sees this. It's fantastic