Category Archives: Etiquette

Israeli Wants to Ape Americans

Ethics, Etiquette, Israel, Morality, Pop-Culture, Terrorism

I grew up in Israel and have never witnessed Israelis throng to Rabin Square (previously “Kings of Israel Square”) to celebrate the death of an enemy, although I’ve seen them a form human chain from Tel-Aviv to Haifa to stop a war.

Yet, such civility is bemoaned in a deeply stupid article on YNetNew.com. Why stupid? The author collapses the distinction between joy on the streets over Israel’s declaration of independence (November 29, 1947), or its winning of the European basketball championship with “public celebrations of battlefield victories.”

The same writer quotes The Book of Proverbs: “Do not rejoice when your enemy falls,” but asserts, without citation or scholarly substantiation, that this crystal-clear proverb “refers to domestic enemies.”

All in all, the idea of mounting an argument in favor of gloating over the death of an enemy—for bad taste—says it all about the Age of the idiot.

NoBamas Bearing Gifts, Please

Barack Obama, Britain, Etiquette, Foreign Policy

Despite animated discussion on the cable networks about the guest list for the British Royal wedding, I noticed that both anchors on FoxNews and MSNBC avoided mentioning the absence of the Obamas. I would have thought that Fox might gloat, but no. Could this be so because the official Left and the Right equate national greatness with the degree to which our political officials are courted across the world? To both official factions, our national honor is wrapped up in our political elites, and not in the common American. Perhaps FoxNews and MSNBC were equally embarrassed? Granted, to substitue for the Obamas’ absence, there are many other odious characters on the list. Still, Margaret Thatcher has been invited, but not Tony Blair and Gordon Brown, the last two god-awful, Labor-government prime ministers.

The official line is good for a laugh: “[O]nly crowned heads of states and and political leaders from the 54-member Commonwealth of nations [are] traditionally invited to royal weddings.”

Maybe the young couple is afraid of the “Gangsta Gifts” Michelle Obama might have brought along?

From the grandeur of her White House Crib, the FLOTUS is famous for giving Prime Minister Brown a box of 25 DVDs including “ET,” “The Wizard of Oz,” and “Star Wars,” “a cheap gift which spoke to the giver’s impoverishment. The DVDs were also region-encoded for North America and could not be played in Britain. Brown gave Obama ‘a pen holder carved from the timber of an anti-slave ship.'”

“Before the DVD and gift-shop gaffes, there was the weightier matter of the bust of Winston Churchill. ‘The valuable bronze by Sir Jacob Epstein had been loaned by the British government to George W. Bush,’ wrote syndicated columnist Diana West. ‘One of President Obama’s first acts as president was to consign that symbol to a box and send it packing.'”

Most recently, as Daniel Hannan noted, Obama “used the Louisiana oil spill to attack an imaginary company called ‘British Petroleum’ (it has been BP for the past decade, ever since the merger with Amoco gave it as many American as British shareholders). … He managed, on his visit to West Africa, to refer to the struggle for independence, but not to the Royal Navy’s campaign against slavery.”

Whether you like Churchill or not is immaterial. The return of the Churchill bronze confirmed the suspicion that Obama was anti-Occident. The habit of giving inappropriate, thoughtless presents—despite the fact that he and his family were deluged with wild effusions of love and lavish gifts—this showed Obama to be, well, a bit of a pig.

Maybe Prince William and Kate Middleton think that inviting the rude American duo to their wedding is infra dig.

[Oh, I learned something new from all this: Tonga is a monarchy.]

On Grief And The Aggrieved

Crime, Democrats, Etiquette, Pop-Culture, Republicans, The State, The Zeitgeist

In the aftermath of the Arizona shootings, our masters in modern Rome are foregoing “partisanship” (read principle) and are coming together to spend funds not their own to secure their sorry asses against the statistically minuscule chance that these royal behinds will come to harm. Curiously, House Democratic Caucus Chairman John Larson is commending House Speaker John Boehner for being “extraordinary in setting the right tone” for “a more enlightened way.”

“A more enlightened way” than what?” It’s almost as though Larson is the aggrieved party and Boehner a member of the offending group. Both parties have assumed these respective roles.

Indeed: “Republicans are clearly responding as if they feel somewhat incriminated,” said University of Michigan political science professor Lisa Disch. “On the one hand, they are acting very quickly to distance themselves from the incident, but on the other hand, they seem to be feeling as if they have been caught at something; caught at using rhetoric that is incendiary.”

On the topic of grief: A day after their child’s dreadful demise, the parents of the “9-year-old girl gunned down in Saturday’s shooting rampage outside an Arizona grocery store” were liberally granting interviews.

To me this is unsettling. We once used to grieve privately—at least initially. These days, there is nothing people will not share and express in public, and ASAP. They have no private selves.

This is part of our festering cultural commons.

I, Obama

Barack Obama, Celebrity, Debt, Ethics, Etiquette, Foreign Policy

My reference in the title is to “I, Claudius,” an “award-winning television serial, based on a book about the Roman Emperor Claudius.”

Jim Kouri of the Examiner.com talks about President Obama and First Lady Michelle’s four-day trip to India:

“The U.S. will spend upwards of $200 million per day on President Barack Obama’s visit to Mumbai. Based on the projection that he’ll stay in India for four days, American taxpayers will be paying close to $1 billion so that the President and his entourage of close to 1,500 people will enjoy first-class accommodations
The huge amount of around $200 million will be spent on security, stay and other aspects of the Presidential visit,” a top official of the Indian government told the BBC.
The people accompanying the Obamas include Secret Service agents, US government officials and journalists favorable to the Obama White House.
Even Indian government officials aren’t certain what what will be accomplished during the Obama visit.”

It appears that this trip is the First Lady’s ostentatious sojourn to Spain on steroids. Somewhere in the US, productive activities are being suspended in order to fund the POTUS, the FLOTUS and their lavish lives. Remember though, that this outlay is nothing as compared to the cost of the legislation He devises. In fact, a $1 billion ransom would be a good deal if we could ensure that He never signed another bill into law, except to nullify what went before.