MISSING MICHAEL BROWN. Yesterday, at the United Nations, the president sought to reassure the world that he really has its best interests at heart. Here�s the speech. Now, there was a passage in the speech's late innings that caused the ol' head whiparound in a lot of us here in the Commonwealth (God save it!) It was that moment when the president spoke to the people in Darfur and told them that he would send one Andrew Natsios there as his own super-special presidential envoy. For those of you keeping score at home, that would be this Andrew Natsios, who, oddly enough, is also this Andrew Natsios. In other words, the president is dispatching to the middle of an ongoing genocide a man whose oversight have already been central to some of the biggest foreign and domestic clusterbumps of the past 50 years. This must be what happens when you lose Michael Brown's phone number. Anyway, it is likely that people will continue to die in Darfur, but our government has made certain that there will be shabbily built, overpriced highways on which to bring out the bodies.
--Charles P. Pierce
