Ehud Olmert posterizes Condi Rice:

US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice was left shame-faced after President George W. Bush ordered her to abstain in a key UN vote on the Gaza war, Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert said on Monday.

“She was left shamed. A resolution that she prepared and arranged, and in the end she did not vote in favour,” Olmert said in a speech in the southern town of Ashkelon.

The UN Security Council passed a resolution last Thursday calling for an immediate ceasefire in the three-week-old conflict in the Gaza Strip and an Israeli withdrawal from Gaza where hundreds have been killed.

As for her boss, I believe the technical term for the following would be a “bitch slap”:

In an unusually public rebuke, Prime Minister Ehud Olmert of Israel said Monday that Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice had been forced to abstain from a United Nations resolution on Gaza that she helped draft, after Mr. Olmert placed a phone call to President Bush.

“I said, ‘Get me President Bush on the phone,’ ” Mr. Olmert said in a speech in the southern Israeli city of Ashkelon, according to The Associated Press. “They said he was in the middle of giving a speech in Philadelphia. I said I didn’t care: ‘I need to talk to him now,’ ” Mr. Olmert continued. “He got off the podium and spoke to me.”

Daaammmn.  Dog on a leash.

Don’t get me wrong, I don’t consider “The Office” of the President to be something worthy of reverence qua The Office - some abstraction that deserves a level of respect that approaches fawning obsequiousness.  Quite the contrary: that’s the type of monarchical thinking that I believe we intended to leave behind in Merry Ol Ingalan.  Presidents, above all, are regular people.  Citizens.  No more, no less (though with Bush, you could make a colorable argument for the latter).

As such, Rice and Bush are each deserving of heaps of irreverent scorn.  Throw shoes if you must.  Burn an effigy or ten.  Start a blog if you’re really feeling devious!

But, there is a time and place for such things, and my anger at this episode has less to do with according “The Office” respect as it does with the identity and rank of the would be disrespector.  Ehud Olmert – in the context of bragging about getting the US government to abstain from voting on a cease fire resolution drafted by the US government – is not what I would consider just comeupance for Bush and Rice. 

Actually, it reveals the depths of our mutually destructive and utterly dysfunctional relationship with Israel – the land whose government is beyond reproach.  Such that it’s leaders can yank a chain and pull our President off the podium, instruct him to publicly humiliate his Secretary of State by pulling the rug out from under her and then, get this, brag about it openly days later.  Without consequences. 

After all, Olmert has a right to defend himself!  What do you want, another holocaust!  Israel is in peril!

Ultimately, what do you suppose Bush is going to do about it?  Obama?  Olmert didn’t seem overly concerned.  He must know something we don’t blatantly obvious but which none must speak of.

ALSO: The Clenis got punked:

…[T]his pattern of behavior didn’t start in 2001. As a number of participants have chronicled, the Clinton administration let the government of then-Prime Minister Ehud Barak determine the direction and pace of Arab-Israeli peace negotiations and Barak often treated Clinton and his aides in a remarkably peremptory fashion. Even Dennis Ross’s memoir The Missing Peace (which is generally sympathetic to the Israeli perspective), betrays repeated irritation at Barak’s highhandedness (see especially pp. 530-532, 539, 550-551, 578-580). The apotheosis was Clinton’s abortive meeting with Syrian President Hafez al Assad in Geneva in March 2000. Undertaken at Barak’s insistence, Clinton later complained to the Israeli PM that the meeting made him feel “like a wooden Indian sitting there doing your bidding.”

All these people drinking lovers spit…