CAJ Note: Please bear in mind, as you read this article, the man on the left is Canadian Prime Minister Harper. The man on the right is…well, you know who He is.
Elizabeth Scalia
The Anchoress
4/13/2010
When people wag a finger in my face, I reach out and cover their hand and say some variation of “don’t say another word to me until you put that finger away.” The variations are not always courtly, but they get the point across.
Awful picture. Awful optics. But I get the impression that Obama and his crew think these sorts of pictures make him look good. He’s sticking it to the man, or something.
The look on Harper’s face, I can’t read. He’s either cowed or repressing his own anger. He appears to be looking directly at Obama’s finger. He is making a fist. Anyone want to supply a caption?
I miss the swaggering cowboy. He may have been tongue-tied; he may have screwed up with an errant backrub, but [he didn’t bow] to royalty, he didn’t give embarrassing gifts to allies, he didn’t show the Dalai Lama the back door. He never said to a visiting ally (paraphrased) “I’m gonna go have dinner with Laura, and if you decide to obey me, I’ll be around.”
He didn’t shove his finger in the face of another country’s prime minister.
But he was considered the boor.
Oh, puke.
* * * * * * *
Why is this man bowing?
Scott Johnson
Power Line
4/13/2010
…Yesterday Obama did it yet again, this time bowing to the Communist Chinese President Hu Jintao during the official arrivals for the Nuclear Security Summit in Washington.
Insofar as I am aware, Obama has not been asked directly to explain his behavior and he has not done so. ABC White House correspondent Jake Tapper sought comment on Obama’s bow to the Japanese Emperor, not from Obama or one of his spokesmen, but rather from “[a]n old friend — an academic with expertise about the Japanese Empire[.]” State Department spokesman Ian Kelly told reporters that the bow was “a sign of respect to the emperor.”
Whence the source of Obama’s “respect” for the King of Saudi Arabia and the president of China as opposed to other heads of state? We are left to speculate on the meaning of Obama’s bowing and scraping for ourselves.
Obama means to teach Americans to bow before monarchs and tyrants. He embodies the ideological multiculturalism that sets the United States on the same plane as other regimes based on tribal privilege, royal bloodlines and one-party rule.
Obama gives expressive form to the idea that the United States now willingly prostrates itself before the rest of the world. He declares that the United States is a country like any other, only worse, because we have so much for which to apologize…
The entire article is at Power Line.
President Barack Obama greets Chinese President Hu Jintao during the official arrivals for the Nuclear Security Summit in Washington, Monday April 12, 2010.
(AP Photo/Susan Walsh)
