Abbas Always Keeps His Cool. Always.
A guest post by Ramification:
Mahmoud Abbas has been recognized this year’s “Most Photogenic Arab President” by the Arab Society for Sanitizing and Honoring our Leaders and Executives (ASSHLE), my prestigious group.
The Most Photogenic Arab 
President award is handed out annually to a leader of an Arab state that can present himself in the most respectable and professional manner during meetings and interviews with world media, while his people get mutilated by a foreign army or domestic police/intelligence.
This year’s competition was very close with President Hosni Mubarak coming in a close second followed by Jordan’s King Abdallah #2. The Most Photogenic Arab President Award has typically gone in the past to one of the Kings/Princes/Sheikhs of the Arabian Gulf.
Mahmoud Abbas managed to top them all with his uncanny ability to look respectable in all of his photo-ops with such world-renowned personalities as George W. Bush, Tzipi Livni, and Condoleezza Rice, as Gaza was being pulverized.
It was close, but the decision ultimately rested on the multitude of interviews with President Mahmoud Abbas taken during the Gaza invasion earlier in 2009. President Abbas managed to keep maximum composure showing no signs of emotions or basic human decency.
His ability to stand in front of hundreds of cameras and deliver speeches condemning the illegal smuggling of weapons into Gaza as his people were being bombed and maimed broke the highest records of unbelievably cowardly and speechless-state-inducing behavior ever witnessed in the region. It is important to note that this type of professionalism is not rare in the leaders of the Middle East. As a matter of fact it is one of the main requirements to becoming a leader of an Arab nation.
The Arab Society for Sanitizing and Honoring our Leaders and Executives (ASSHLE), founded and chaired by none other than yours truly Ramification, has set its mandate to constantly educate and expand its power base amongst the elitist of the elite in this here cultured Arab blogosphere.
The series of tubes that make the internet provide for a great opportunity and Ramification is hell-bent on capturing at least 0.01% of it (even if it involves spam or fake awards). It is important to note that it is still quite early in 2009 and ASSHLE reserves the right to withdraw the award and hand it to another Arab leader if he (or she?) deliver an even more wickedly cold-hearted set of interviews.
