First, the US delegation decides to stick around for one of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s speeches at the UN, and then the highest-ranking US diplomat at Turtle Bay takes a powder when Israel’s Prime Minister gets up to speak.  Instead, UN Ambassador Susan Rice chose to attend a luncheon in which she wasn’t even the highest-ranking American diplomat.  If I didn’t know any better, I’d say there’s a message being sent by the Obama administration, and both Greta Van Susteren and John Bolton agree:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=Ai0tcV-ShjY

Katie Pavlich puts this in perspective:

At a time when Iran is closer than ever to a nuclear weapon, it seems our U.S. Ambassador to the U.N. doesn’t really care about the only true democracy in the Middle East, Israel. Just like this administration doesn’t seem to care about using the word terrorism to describe the war we are in. This move by Rice came just days after President Obama blew Netanyahu off so he could go party with Jay-Z, Beyonce, the ladies from The View and David Letterman.

I must say that if I’d been told three years ago that the Obama administration’s UN delegation would attend an Ahmadinejad speech and snub Benjamin Netanyahu, I’d have scoffed at the notion.  Not even this administration could be that tone-deaf and arrogant, I’d have said.  And I’d have been wrong.

Update: There seems to be some confusion in the comments.  There were two speeches by Ahmadinejad at the UN — we attended the first and skipped the second, which is why I wrote “one of Ahmadinejad’s speeches.”