This time it was on his visit to Great Britain — or, if you take his word for it, England, which he referred to in lieu of the nation’s proper name in a move that likely incurred the less-than-warm-and-fuzzy feelings in residents of Wales, Northern Ireland, and Scotland (the home of British Prime Minister Gordon Brown) that it would in residents of, say, New York, Texas, and California if a foreign leader claiming to be a citizen of the world and a bright new light in the international diplomatic scene came to America and spoke of his country’s great relationship with, say, Kentucky.
According to The Wall Street Journal‘s Alistair MacDonald:
Mr. Obama’s first major foreign trip has been seen as a test not just of his leadership skills, but of his ability to navigate the protocols of diplomacy. In the U.K., that means mentioning the famous special relationship between the countries, which has been important here ever since Winston Churchill first referenced it after World War II.
On Wednesday at a joint conference with Prime Minister Gordon Brown, Mr. Obama made a pass at acknowledging the special relationship. Unfortunately, he inadvertently broke a cardinal protocol by at one stage using England to denote U.K.
“We owe so much to England; that when you come here there’s that sense of familiarity, as well as difference, that makes it just a special place,” said Obama at the joint presser.
Further, wrote MacDonald:
But in a statement to make any republican-minded Scots wince, Mr. Obama conceded one thing he loved about the U.K. — the Queen.
This isn’t a surprise for a couple of reasons, the first of which is that President Obama has such a track record of violating protocol and inflaming our allies through the casual, careless tossing out of insults that, just over seventy days into his presidency, another case of an embarrassing international Obama gaffe barely causes the twitch of an eyebrow among those who have been paying attention to his words and actions.
The second reason this isn’t a surprise is that one could hardly expect more attention and care to be paid to diplomatic niceties and attention to detail when the country the president is visiting, despite the history of a “special relationship” between it and America, is viewed by the administration itself as having “nothing special about” it — as being “just the same as the other 190 countries in the world.”
After all, it’s not like every single word would be monitored and protocol observed for an Obama visit to, say, East Timor; so why would any more care be taken for a country that’s “just the same” as it?
The real problem here, of course, is that “citizen of the world” Barack Obama is truly nothing of the sort, instead being another simple but arrogant Liberal who thinks negotiating from a position of weakness makes America less likely to be threatened, who evidently believes saying “Pock-eee-stohn” means he understands international relations, and who thinks playing nice with the UN and demanding that his fellow countrymen learn foreign languages that he doesn’t speak, and embrace foreign cultures he doesn’t understand as equals of (or superior to) our own, is the same thing as being an international relationship-builder.
As RB Stratford wrote at Quick Daily Hits:
This is an adminstration that is so full of itself, so obsessed with its mission to remake America in its own image, that it is unconcerned with (or unaware of) the rubble it’s beginning to leave in its wake.
Contra what the Bush-hating left claimed about that former president’s supposed wrecking of international relationships and of America’s image abroad, Obama’s personal pile of “rubble” has already grown well beyond that which Bush left behind — and we’re only about five percent of the way through with the current president’s first (and hopefully only) term.
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