Obama’s speech to the UN included an admonition to its members to not use the podium to denounce other member nations nor to foment divisiveness and express disrespect. Rather, he emphasized that member nations should respect each other’s differences and listen to each other’s grounds for disputes and disagreements.

Ironically, immediately following Obama’s speech, when Muammar Qaddafi and then Machmud Achmadinajad took to the podium, members walked out in protest. Without listening, they prejudged what these leaders were going to say. Like spoiled children, they took their marbles and went home. Not all members acted in this immature, impolitic manner. Unfortunately, to my own personal chagrin, and to the disgrace of our nation, our own representatives walked out, thereby belying the spirit that our president had so magnanimously proclaimed as the model all should follow. Furthermore, the TV stations verbally condoned and applauded this fractious, discordant, ignoble, and counterproductive conduct. By doing so, the media lent support to the very fractiousness displayed by the right-wing republican ranting, obstructionist tactics the media recently have been deriding.

Perhaps by drawing their audience’s attention to the most low-browed, pugnacious aspect of this otherwise auspicious and commendable UN occasion, they appeal to the lowest common denominator within that audience, that is to say the more boisterous, least educated, and most uninformed and opinionated, most easily swayed by banal bluster, segment of the American public. May I presume that the media is taking this approach because it increases their ratings and insures the loyalty of and remuneration from their advertisers? If that should be the case, then the collective behavior of those politicians, the media and their advertisers, and that boorish segment of their audience, all together, does not augur well for the future prospects of the promising vision laid before the world by our noble, brilliant, visionary president.

We must question whether or not we are or will be worthy of our stately new president. Should someone take the unpopular but more noble stance and, in a statesmanlike manner, comment on this unfortunate turn of events? Should someone take to the air and explain why such unintelligent, piggish political behavior actually serves to exacerbate the very behavior of these so-called rogue nations that the walk-outs were protesting? Should someone point out why such ‘unconstructive’ political behavior is actually ‘destructive’ of efforts toward world peace?

How can we claim to be the moral model for the rest of the world when we act with such blatant duplicity?