Obama Bows to Jap Emperor

[DisturbedPervert]

What a bastard Ju is for not being polite back. 

Obama displayed his deference towards the PRC, and Ju accepted it.  He was being polite.

[Admiral Yi]

I know Yuro PMs bow when they meet their own monarchs because I saw The Queen, but what do Yuro monarchs do when they meet each other?

[Valmy]

Homosexuals, white male landowning ones anyway, have always had the vote.

What about gay Arabic linguists? 

Being the greatest Americans evah, I think they should exclusively weild the vote.

[Malthus]

I know Yuro PMs bow when they meet their own monarchs because I saw The Queen, but what do Yuro monarchs do when they meet each other?

Have sex to make new monarchs, of course.

[derspiess]

Seriously?

Ja.

You seriously think that showing a bit of cultural awareness and courtesy counts as grovelling and diminishes the nation?

You're acting as if this occurred in a vaccum.  If it were *only* this I might leave Obama alone. 

But his tendency to go apologize to the world whenever he travels gives some context to his habit of bowing to certain foreign leaders (all non-white, interestingly enough).

[Zanza]

I know Yuro PMs bow when they meet their own monarchs because I saw The Queen, but what do Yuro monarchs do when they meet each other?

We haven't had a monarch in some time, but here is Wilhelm II.

That's Kaiser Wilhelm II meeting the Ottoman Sultan. At best a small nod, not a real bow.


Wilhelm II meeting the Moroc Sultan.


I very much doubt that the self-conception of the German Emperors included bowing to anyone.

[Brazen]

I know Yuro PMs bow when they meet their own monarchs because I saw The Queen, but what do Yuro monarchs do when they meet each other?

Belly barging.

[Grallon]

This is still controversial?   

EDIT: Actually why was it ever a controversy in the first place?

Ahh yes, conservatives grasping at straws to undermine the president by any means.




G.

[Richard Hakluyt]

It's just as well that the Kaiser didn't do deep bows, that spiked helmet could do serious damage if he had........and Edward VII's gut was a large target too 

[PDH]

Seriously though, Obama may think that groveling to the world makes him more popular, but all he's doing is diminishing his office and the nation he serves.  Not that I think he's particularly bothered by the latter, mind you.

Do you understand what the word "groveling" means?  What is servile about any of this?

[dps]

I know Yuro PMs bow when they meet their own monarchs because I saw The Queen, but what do Yuro monarchs do when they meet each other?

We haven't had a monarch in some time, but here is Wilhelm II.

That's Kaiser Wilhelm II meeting the Ottoman Sultan. At best a small nod, not a real bow.

Is the Sultan saluting him, or doing a facepalm? 

Given some of the things I've heard about Willy, it could reasonably be the latter. 

[derspiess]

Seriously though, Obama may think that groveling to the world makes him more popular, but all he's doing is diminishing his office and the nation he serves.  Not that I think he's particularly bothered by the latter, mind you.

Do you understand what the word "groveling" means?  What is servile about any of this?

See my more recent post.  It doesn't begin or end with his bowing.

[jimmy olsen]

Truly Obama is an inspiration to us all.

http://www.newsweek.com/id/223821

George F. Will
The First 'Pacific President'?

Inflation is not only a monetary matter.
Published Nov 21, 2009
From the magazine issue dated Nov 30, 2009

Barack Obama's irresistible, or at least unresisted, propensity for self-aggrandizement bubbled up yet again during his recent trip to the Far East when he proclaimed himself "America's first Pacific president." Hearing this, Asians may have muttered about inscrutable Occidentals. Obama's exercise in rhetorical grandiosity, while hardly his first, was exquisitely meaningless. (Click here to follow George F. Will).

Yes, Obama lived for 14 years in Hawaii, which is in the Pacific. But two presidents (Ronald Reagan, and before him Richard Nixon, who in 1972 ended the freeze in U.S.-China relations that began in 1949) came from California, which is on the Pacific. So, is the world-historic difference in the preposition?

Yes, Obama lived four years, until the age of 10, in Indonesia. But two young men who were to become America's 35th and 41st presidents also had formative experiences in the Pacific: John Kennedy's PT-109 was sunk beneath him, and George Herbert Walker Bush, a future envoy to China, had his Grumman Avenger shot down. And before becoming America's 27th president, William Howard Taft governed the Philippines for about as many years as child Obama lived in Indonesia.

In May 1900, America's 25th president, William McKinley, sent U.S. troops to China to help put down the Boxer Rebellion. America's 33rd president, Harry Truman, waged serious war in Asia—in Korea, where Americans suffered 157,530 casualties, including 54,246 fatalities. Dwight Eisenhower vowed, during the 1952 campaign, "I shall go to Korea," which Americans correctly heard as a vow to end the war one way or another. In December of that year the president-elect did something no serving president had ever done: He set foot on the far side of the Pacific. America's 38th president, Gerald Ford, was the first to visit Japan while in office. (President Ulysses S. Grant visited Japan after leaving office, and is said to have been the first person to shake the emperor's hand. America's First Pacific President bowed.)

President Taft's predecessor, Theodore Roosevelt, sort of earned—imagine that—his Nobel Peace Prize for helping to mediate the end of the Russo-Japanese War in 1905. (The mediation occurred in Portsmouth, N.H.; TR did not attend.) In October 1908, the "Great White Fleet" that TR sent around the world as an act of national exuberance arrived in Japan, where U.S. officers were housed in the emperor's palace.

In order to encourage Japan, then an almost hermetically sealed society, to play nicely with others, in March 1852 America's 13th president, Millard Fillmore, ordered Commodore Matthew Perry to go to Tokyo with the U.S. Navy's East India Squadron, which had first been dispatched across the Pacific in 1835 by America's seventh president, Andrew Jackson. Perry's 1853 visit to Tokyo Bay was not persuasive, so he returned in 1854—by then his commander in chief was America's 14th president, Franklin Pierce—with a larger fleet. The spectacle of what the Japanese called the "black ships" moved them to sign a treaty of "permanent" friendship, which became impermanent at 7:49 a.m., Dec. 7, 1941.

The first U.S. treaty with China was signed in 1844 under the 10th president, John Tyler. Pacific waves have lapped the republic's shores since California attained statehood in September 1850. The 11th president, James Polk, had wrested California from Mexico, and the 12th president, Zachary Taylor, died before statehood came under Fillmore.

All this—indeed, all of the human story—was but prologue to today's culmination in a president who, in his 10th month in office, flew across the Pacific for seven days in Asia, thereby becoming "America's first Pacific president." Such rhetorical inflation devalues the currency of words with which we think. Not everywhere, though. Listeners to Garrison Keillor's A Prairie Home Companion know that one of the businesses in Lake Wobegon, Minn., is Ralph's Pretty Good Grocery. ("If you can't get it at Ralph's, you can probably get along without it.") In an age of pandemic hyperbole, the store's name is a refreshing zephyr of modesty.

Come 2012, America's First Pacific President—self-proclaimed "citizen of the world," whose advent marked, he said, "the moment when the rise of the oceans began to slow and our planet began to heal"—will be seeking reelection. Someone running against him might find that this resonates with a public suffering greatness fatigue: "Vote for me and get a pretty good president."

[Neil]

Yeah, Obama is an ass.

[Fate]

Yeah, conservatards are butt-hurt.