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.]
