Fruitbat In A Dinner Jacket

‘Fruitbat’ at Bat
by MAUREEN DOWD
Published: September 26, 2007

“Casey At The Bat” is a famous poem about a small-town baseball hero that endures humiliation when he strikes out in a clutch situation. Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad was called a fruitbat by Greg Gutfeld of Fox News upon the event of his delivering a speech at Columbia University.

And on top of all that, we help build up the self-serving doofus Iranian president, a frontman with a Ph.D. in traffic management, into the sort of larger-than-life demon that the real powers in Iran — the mullahs — can love.

According to Wikipedia, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s doctorate is in transportation engineering and planning, a subdivision of civil engineering. His undergraduate entrance exam scores ranked him 132 out of 40,000.

But while challenging the policies and ideology of the Evil Empire, Ronald Reagan understood he had to engage Mikhail Gorbachev, not ignore or insult him.

Reagan was able to help the Soviet Union — and world communism — to fall apart. All W. has managed to do is destroy the country he wanted to turn into a democracy and make Iran more powerful than it was before.

In Iranian eyes, the U.S. has behaved in a way that continually diminishes their country” — from U.S. involvement in the 1953 coup that reinstated the Shah to W.’s branding them as part of the “axis of evil.”

Ronald Reagan called the Soviet Union the “Evil Empire” in a speech on March 3, 1983. The Soviet Union dissolved amid political and economic chaos in 1991. Dubya described Iraq, Iran, and North Korea as members of the “Axis of Evil” in his State of The Union speech on January 29, 2002. The United States invaded and defeated Iraq in March of 2003. North Korea tested a nuclear device in 2006. Iran, well, that's the point.

Wouldn’t sticks and carrots — cultural fluency, smart psychology and Reaganesque dialogue — be a better way to bring the Iranians around than sticks and stones?

“Carrot and stick” is a frequently debated metaphor that either means a combination of rewards and punishments is the best combination of motivations or it implies that the hope for a reward, no matter how illusory is an effective incentive.

Sticks and stones may break my bones / But words will never hurt me is a common schoolyard rebuttal to verbal insults. Maybe stones and carrots like in the stone soup fable would be the best solution.

The president’s irrelevant U.N. speech was a bad combo with the schoolyard name-calling of Lee Bollinger.

Complete the following the analogy:

Kettle:pot::Lee Bollinger:_________

(Hint.)