Reading of the manner in which Barack Obama has been harangued by a motley assortment of caciques and panjandrums at the summit meeting of the Organization of American States, I am put in mind of Gulliver in Lilliput.

Here is how Gulliver described his first encounter with the Lilliputians; and these words should serve to portray how Obama must have felt when Daniel Ortega and Hugo Chavez and Cristina Fernandez de Kirchner and the insufferable Lula minced and frothed and wagged their truculent little fingers at him:"I heard a confused Noise about me. ... In a little time I felt something alive moving on my left Leg, which advancing gently forward over my Breast, came almost up to my Chin; when bending my Eyes downwards as much as I could, I perceived it to be a human Creature...