Video: New secular pope appears on balcony

No word here on any future political ambitions, of course. Bryan predicted in the other thread that the Goracle would eschew anything so mean and democratic as the presidency going forward and instead set his sights on a truly exalted position: Secretary-General of the UN. Probable? Not really. A little googling reveals that while there’s an unstated agreement among the five permanent members of the Security Council that no citizen of their countries should be elevated to SecGen lest it tilt the balance of power, there’s also nothing hard and fast in the UN Charter that prohibits it. Conceivably, the other four members might waive their objections to a U.S. nominee if they thought he’d serve as a check on U.S. power rather than as an instrument of it. Electing a Democrat SecGen to act as a counterweight to a Republican president is just what the doctor ordered. So what’s stopping Gore? Three things: (1) the U.S. government, acting through the ambassador to the UN, would have the power to veto the nomination in the Security Council; (2) SecGens are typically tapped for two five-year terms, and needless to say it’s unlikely there’ll be any circumstances anytime soon in which the GOP has such a long-term lock on the presidency that the rest of the Security Council is willing to invest in a Democratic SecGen for 10 years; and (3) as China becomes a great power, the threat to the United States will force enough of a rough alignment between Democrats and Republicans vis-a-vis Beijing that the Chinese will refuse to sign off on any American of whatever political stripe as SecGen.

There’s potentially another reason why it wouldn’t work — theoretically, no Democrat would accept the position knowing that he would be expected to act as a drag on his own country’s government. But who are we kidding, right?

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