Evidently, actor Jon Voight -- obviously someone with great experience and insight on matters of foreign diplomacy, since he once played President Roosevelt in the movies -- warmed up the audience for last night's GOP fundraiser by reading from his prepared speech as though it were a first read-through on a script. And we gather he thinks President Obama needs to get tougher with the rest of the world:
Voight: It saddens me greatly to think we were the great power for good in the world. We as Americans knew America to be strong. And we were the liberators of the entire world. We are becoming a weak nation.
Of course, invading another country under false pretenses -- an invasion Voight avidly supported -- couldn't have had anything to do with that decline, could it? Adopting a torture regime as official American policy had nothing to do with our low moral standing among the world's nation's, did it?
Voight: Obama really thinks he is a soft-spoken Julius Caesar, he thinks he's going to conquer the world with his soft-spoken sweet talk, and really thinks he's going to bring all the enemies of the world into a little playground where they'll swing each other back and forth.
Hmmmmm. So which is it, Jon? A Roman dictator, or a sweet-talking naif? We gather he thinks Obama is behaving like the latter abroad, and the former at home. But, you know, they don't really go together in the same package very well.
Guess this is why movie stars make the worst dinner emcees. Big thinkers, they're not.
In any event, watching Voight tread through these paces reminded me of one of his more recent starring roles: As Jonas Hodges, the evil mastermind of the renegade black-ops outfit that was Jack Bauer's nemesis in the eighth season of "24." Looks like some of that mindset rubbed off ...
