Barack bows a little too deeply to the king of Saud, and people go ballistic. (Don’t be nasty; neoconservatives are people too.) I don’t get it, but I’ll try and deconstruct it—as well as explain why I don’t give a tinker’s damn what gestures Barry makes, so long as he keeps his mitts off my wallet and doesn’t destroy my neighborhood (fat chance for both) .
The same people were mum when Bush and King Abdullah skipped through a field of delphinium (that’s what the romantic setting looked like) holding hands and smiling adoringly at one another. Puzzling to me is the inability of some to apply the same rules to all their leaders.
“Their leader“: therein lies the rub. I think people are upset because they identify with Barry; they vest in him all kinds of symbolism; they see in him a representative.
I don’t.
Maybe I’m just a hopeless individualist, but I don’t identify with any politician; I consider them all corrupt and tainted by virtue of having chosen to make a living through the predatory, political, coercive means, rather than on the voluntary market.
Barry doesn’t stand for me, so I don’t care whose keister he kisses. I objected over his “Gangsta Gift” to the queen, not because he disgraced me; he has nothing to do with me, but because, as a traditionalist, I believe in hierarchy and civility. The queen might be a member of the much-maligned landed aristocracy, but she has acquitted herself as a natural aristocrat would—Elizabeth II has lived a life of dedication and duty, and done so with impeccable class. (It was a sad day when she capitulated to the mob and to the cult of the Dodo Diana.)
But I digress.
The other reason I don’t invest The Leader’s every move with such significance is because I consider him to have a limited role de jure. That he has usurped it is another matter. Certainly being polite to other national leaders is a good thing.
In this context, radio host Laura Ingraham baffled me the other day (and on most days) when she too became so exercised over Barry’s civility to the Europeans. This batty bird was furious that her leader’s plan was rejected by the Europeans. I know Ingraham is incoherent on the economic front. But if she disagrees with the stimulus, surely she would not wish to see Europeans stimulating. Isn’t a principle supposed to hold steady across continents? For the life of me, I could not fathom why this broad was mad because Barry was not being tough with the Europeans and they were not prepared to stimulate as obscenely as he was.
Basically, Ingraham had succumbed to the “Our guy vs. their guys” group think. They all do.
And this is what this fury over The Bow is all about: group think. He’s our guy and he should not be appearing weak (read respectful) to their guys. Collectivists have invested in the political process and in Obama a bit of themselves.
Now, neocons hate China, Saudi Arabia and Russia more than they hate, say, Mexico. Given my foreign policy perspective—shared with our founding fathers—I want other nations to keep our overweening leaders in check. I explained how in “Thank You, Nancy Pelosi”:
Those of us who want the U.S. to stay solvent—and out of the affairs of others—recognize that sovereign nation-states that resist, not enable, our imperial impulses, are the best hindrance to hegemonic overreach. Patriots for a sane American foreign policy ought to encourage all America’s friends … to push back and do what is in their national interest, not ours.
Doug Powers, my WND colleague, has his own theory about The Bow. It’s very funny:
“The president was only somewhat stooped over because he was trying to show King Abdullah what was on the iPod he brought over for him as a present. Naturally, it ended up being little embarrassing and somewhat insulting to the Saudis due to Obama’s insistence on “keeping it real” with what was loaded into the King’s gift.” (Be sure to check out the customized iPod tunes Obama made up for Abdullah).
Speaking of the confused Laura Ingraham, a shout out to Patrick O’Hannigan of The American Spectator, for actually bothering to tease apart the difference between my thinking on the economics of “pay equity,” and that of pro-life feminists like the radio host and Sarah Palin. O’Hannigan is referring to “Barack Against the Boys“:
Columnist Ilana Mercer was not at the ceremony, but asked the kind of economically-informed question that rarely percolates up through discussions of pay equity: If women with the same skills as men were getting only 78 cents for every dollar a man earns, wouldn’t men have long-since priced themselves out of the job market? The fact that men haven’t done that might mean that different abilities and experiences are at work, Mercer guessed, “rather than a conspiracy to suppress women.”
Mercer’s glass slipper of a response to equity issues will not fit anyone in the Obama administration, but it still attracts more positive attention than Christina Hoff Summers’ argument that boys rather than girls need help, thanks to a culture that derides men as oafs, and an educational system that considers masculinity the root of intolerance.
Update (April 5): It’s time to despair of the discourse in this country when people get worked up over a man tilting his body toward another, but not about the bankrupting of the US by the man and his predecessor. Yes, columns dealing with the former routinely garner more fury than those addressing the latter.
Anyone who suggests Americans abhor signs of subservience because they are familiar with the Declaration of Independence cannot be serious, and if he is serious, should not be taken seriously. Reading so much into a tilt of the frame exemplifies a flight from reason and reality into empty symbolism–as Rome burns.
As to the notion that two men holding hands is less subservient than a fleeting bow–heavens! Two men rubbing flesh is way worse than a representative of the US showing respect to another with a quick bow. The Japanese are constantly bowing at each other. So what!
The excerpt is from “Gangsta Gifts,” now on WorldNetDaily.com:
“Hip” is how rapt reporters referred to the iPod the president and first lady gave the Queen of England. Thanks to his fawning friends in the British and American media, Barack Obama got away with giving another foreign dignitary a vulgar gift.
Shades of the reality show “Cribs”…
The MTV series features hip-hop rappers, and other American royalty, showing off their incredibly gaudy homes, CD, DVD, and iPod collections. (If there are any books in the house, these are well hidden.) They then send the loving camera crew packing.
The Obama iPod was no ordinary “small portable digital audio player capable of storing thousands of tracks in a variety of formats, including MP3.” As any teenager would for his crush, the tacky pair had personalized the thing. How do you customize an iPod for an 82-year-old monarch? …
Commensurate with the president’s signal solipsism, you make sure that there are plenty of images and audio from his inaugural and DNC addresses. … ”
The complete column, “Gangsta Gifts,” can be read now on WND.com.
“Being smart is cooler than anything in the world,” America’s first lady told a gaggle of squealing, high-fiving, weeping girls at a North London school. And Michelle Obama should know, no?
“If you want to know the reason why I am standing here, it’s because of education,” she told them.
“I never cut class. I loved getting As, I liked being smart. I liked being on time. I thought being smart is cooler [should be “was cooler”] than anything in the world. You, too, with these values, can control your own destiny. You, too, can pave the way.” She urged them to believe in their dreams.
“For nothing in my life ever would have predicted that I would be standing here as the first African-American First Lady[There she goes again]. I was not raised with wealth or resources or any social standing to speak of. I was raised on the South Side of Chicago — that’s the real part of Chicago.”
Cut the cr-p.
Michelle Obama was raised in a country where affirmative action saw to it that mediocrities like herself usurped the real meritocracy. That pesky detail the first wife forgot.
I read Michelle’s university thesis; it’s the product of a banal, third-rate mind. I grant that her meteoric rise had to do with some hard work and pushy grit, but, more than anything, Michelle is a product of affirmative action—a product of a society where, as Joseph Farah put it “black [is] the new color of privilege.”
Daniel Hannan (a Ron Paul fan) is a “writer and journalist, and has been Conservative MEP for South East England since 1999.” Hannan’s masterful use of the English language and articulation of first principles is unmatched in the American political landscape (and beyond), where intellectualism is frowned upon, and the use of anything more than Pidgin English is berated by boors.
Hannan’s dazzling display of rhetoric and reason are on the wane in the UK too. I also happen to believe that had he spoken out against corrupt Keynesianism in the age of Bush, who begat our economic woes, the American punditocracy would not have turned him into a sensation. It so happens that the boobs who could not get enough of Bush have had a bellyful of Barack.
Watch Hannan’s speech to the European parliament. Then listen to Cavuto questioning Hannan—how cumbersome and incapable of articulating principles is the former compared to latter. About one thing Cavuto is correct: the UK’s debt is minor compared to that of the US, which approximates 75 percent of the GDP. What Hannan says has been written before, here for example. But at least there is one English-speaking politician who’s piped up at last.
GLENN: We have now Daniel Hannan on the phone. He is a member of parliament for the European community. He’s the representative of the U.K. and he was on television last night and just a plain spoken guy and has a lot of credibility because, you know, he’s got the English accent and that always works. Daniel, how are you, sir?
HANNAN: Glenn, it’s great to talk to you. I mean, what a brilliant introduction. I think we should just call it quits there, don’t you think?
GLENN: You said last night on the program, and we barely even touched on anything. You said the conversation that we had on television you couldn’t have in the United Kingdom on the BBC.
HANNAN: Well, this is because organizations that are owned by the states generally tend to be on the left, and the BBC is I’m afraid no exception.
GLENN: So is this why what you said and there’s a YouTube video and we’ll send it out in our newsletter today. Is this why when you went to parliament and you said a couple of things that we’re going to play here, that it wasn’t really covered in the U.K.? It’s bigger over here than it was over there?
HANNAN: Yeah. I mean, I think you’ve got, you’ve got a bit of an alternative media in a way that there isn’t really in Europe, and I think what happened, what I was doing was attacking the money that’s being fire hosed at this financial crisis, you know, the bailouts, internationalizations and the subsidies and all the things that you guys are doing as well, the bailout of the auto industries and all this. The things that everyone within what we call the Westminster British, I guess what you would call within the Beltway kind of agreed on this in the early days, the pundits, the commentators, the politicians and obviously the bankers themselves. And so there was nobody really to articulate the view of those kind of 80% of people who said, well, hang on, wait a minute; why should I hand over more money and tax so that the government can give it to the banks, so that the banks can lend it back to me, if I’m lucky, for interest, you know? And that was that turned out to be a pretty widespread view, but it just didn’t have any articulation.
Now, I guess in the U.S. where you’ve got, you know, you’ve got programs like this one, you’ve got things like the Fox News TV, you’ve got a bit more of an outlet for those things.
GLENN: Yeah, a bit more, but they are trying to silence and discredit anybody that speaks out against it. Could you please
HANNAN: Never forget that you are the majority. I remember when I was 15 years old, I was at school and a guy, a conservative philosopher called Roger Scruton came to do a talk and I said to him, what do you think is the role of a conservative philosopher in this day and age? And he thought for a bit and he said, the role of a conservative thinker is to reassure the people that their prejudices are true. And, you know, I think that’s what you should never, ever forget that what is called a kind of kooky, weird position by some of the political elites very often turns out to be very widespread support which is, of course, why you guys don’t like democracy, why they don’t like referendums, why they don’t like elections.
GLENN: Daniel, what do you see happening to England? You guys are out of money. The Bank of England, which, correct me if I’m wrong. I don’t know your system of government very well but it’s my understanding that that’s kind of like our treasury secretary, and he doesn’t say things like that. He doesn’t come out and make political statements. True or false?
HANNAN: No, I mean, it’s very, very unusual.
GLENN: Okay.
HANNAN: It’s almost unprecedented and it shows how serious things have got that he says this publicly. I mean, I’m sure he says them privately.
GLENN: And reestablish what he said this week.
HANNAN: He well, initially we reacted to the financial crisis as you did by spending a lot of money. The first instinct of a lot of politicians in a moment of crisis is to reach into somebody else’s wallet and ours were no different than yours and for a while people went along with it. It’s become clear it didn’t work. On all of the measures that bailout was a failure. But rather than admit that, Gordon Brown is stuck in this thing of saying, “Okay, I spent all this money and it doesn’t work. Oh, I’ll spend even more money. Maybe that will work even better.” Now, it got so serious that the governor of the Bank of England who is a kind of, how can I say it, he is a discreet figure, he doesn’t do interviews very often.
GLENN: He’s English.
HANNAN: When he comes out publicly and says, look, we can’t do this, we are out of cash, I think that’s very serious and I think we can assume that he’s been giving that message privately for a long time without success and so he feels he has to come out and say it to a wider audience. GLENN: Daniel, here’s what I’m concerned about. I have been concerned about the patterns that we have here in America. They have been going this way for a while. You are in are you still in France or are you in England?
HANNAN: You know what, at the moment I am in Switzerland. I’m in one of the few truly sovereign democracies in Europe.
GLENN: You know, our founders wanted us to be like Switzerland and, gosh, I wish we were. We would have had the hot chocolate and everything else. In France right now there are boss nappings. These unions are now kidnapping their bosses and holding them until they change their severance or their pensions or any other terms that they want. I am real concerned that there is a revolution that is on the we’re on the edge of a worldwide revolution where people think that they are fighting for the little man but it is actually a power grab after we have just tubed all of our economies. I mean, your people in England have been warning about, what do they call it, the summer of rage.
HANNAN: And that could well happen. And the reason it’s going to happen is people just don’t feel that the Democratic system is working. You know, this thing, I hear it all the time when I’m knocking on doors as a politician and I suspect congressional candidates do that as well, this constant thing of it doesn’t matter how I vote, nothing ever changes, they are all the same. Now, in Europe that’s pretty true because the decision making power isn’t really vested in any elected representative, whatever. It’s in the hands of the European commission and the rest of the kind of sending bureaucracy. And so what you are seeing with, what do you call this explosion of rage, what it really is is people feeling that the constitutional and Democratic mechanisms that are meant to articulate that point of view have failed and so they are going directly to the streets to do it in a different way.
Now, this is a remedial problem. There are a lot of things you can do to make the Democratic system work. There’s still time to avert this problem. But ultimately if you don’t give people any legitimate voice, they tend to take it out directly to the country in an angry and bellicose way.
GLENN: There doesn’t seem to be here in America a lot of people that understand this except the people, and when I talk to actual people, they all say the same thing, that this is getting out of control, that there is too much control, that they are disenfranchising us because they are not listening to us, they are not doing the things that as in England they are spending money and the vast majority of Americans say this is a bad idea; don’t do this. And yet they are doing it anyway. Is there any in Washington there seems to be very few people that understand what’s bubbling up underneath the surface. Do the people in your position in England understand and the rest of Europe understand what’s in their future?
HANNAN: I mean, I think in Britain we still have a system that’s kind of more or less Democratic and more or less it’s got a lot in common with yours and I think there is a lot of sensitivity. When you say Europe generally, if by Europe you mean Brussels, then absolutely not. Public opinion is seen in the EU as an obstacle to overcome, not as a reason to change direction. If you think that sounds extreme, you think I’m exaggerating when I say that, look at how they reacted to these no votes. You know, they have got this Constitution to give themselves more power to take more power away from the national capitals and it was put to a referendum and people kept voting no. France voted no, Holland voted no, Ireland voted no and the reaction in Brussels was, yeah, they didn’t really mean that. They were voting on something else. They misunderstood the question. So let’s just go ahead and implement it anyway. It’s like that scary poem which ends with the lines, wouldn’t it be easier to dissolve the people and elect another in their place. I mean, that could be the that’s the slogan of the EU.
GLENN: So Daniel, what is what is your best advice here? I mean, we have eight million people listening here in America all across the country and you guys are ahead of us on everything. What is your best advice? What should Americans be looking out for? What should Americans, when we hear our politicians here say this is the solution, this is the direction, what have you learned through experience? Don’t do that.
HANNAN: Yeah, you should learn from our mistakes. I mean, the single biggest area where I could see you making this mistake is on this thing of the nationalized healthcare system. I mean, I hope that sanity is going to prevail. I know it’s been kicked around before and it hasn’t happened. I love my country even more than I love yours, you know, but god, I would love to get rid of our system and have something that puts patients in charge rather than putting doctors’ unions and bureaucrats in charge. That’s the single biggest thing. More widely than that, you know, you can spend your money better than politicians can. You’ve got a better idea of what to do with it than governments have. You know, we have this thing for 10 years in the U.K. which is saying the current government that we’ve got. Of people feeling that it was kind of mean for us to think that. You know, if you said I don’t want to pay any more tax, that was taken not as an intellectual critique of whether the government was better placed to spend the money than you were. It was taken as a sign that you didn’t want to because you didn’t care about the poor or, you know, you were greedy. And people who should have known better kind of got right along with that and talked themselves into this kind of wanting to wrap themselves in this great warm duvet of national solidarity. And, of course, the only beneficiaries of that are the state bureaucrats who take the money and laugh all the way to the bank.
GLENN: Daniel Hannan, I wish you the best of luck and we would like to stay in touch with you. You make an awful lot of sense and it’s easier to hear from one of our brothers in England and I think people I think you have a way of penetrating with a clearer voice because you are speaking about your country and we can see the similarities.
HANNAN: You’ve got a great system there. Think long and hard before you toss it away.
GLENN: Thank you very much. We’ll talk again, my friend.
HANNAN: Thank you.
GLENN: Wow, is that kind of sobering, Stu? Just amazing.
