The New York Times is nothing if not consistent, and in this case it means consistently in the corner, two steps behind the President they helped elect by spiking any story that might portray him as anything but the greatest human being to walk the earth since Jesus Christ himself.
Many people outside of the mainstream media have taken on the story of President Obama bowing to the Saudi Arabian King last week, while many inside the mainstream media are notably silent. We’ve been told by many supporters of the messiah at 1600 that we’re not supposed to care about stuff like that, and it’s all just pageantry and symbolism and the only people promoting such stupidity are so anti-Obama they can’t see straight. It’s a partisan attack designed to paint the hero of the free world as incompetent, or worse, inexperienced.
So it comes as a huge surprise to me that the very thing they’ve dismissed about Barack Obama is something that warranted a column about in 1994.
“IF I see another king, I think I shall bite him,” Teddy Roosevelt once growled. Offered that opportunity with the Japanese equivalent last week, Bill Clinton turned out to have had quite something else in mind.
It wasn’t a bow, exactly. But Mr. Clinton came close. He inclined his head and shoulders forward, he pressed his hands together. It lasted no longer than a snapshot, but the image on the South Lawn was indelible: an obsequent President, and the Emperor of Japan.
Canadians still bow to England’s Queen; so do Australians. Americans shake hands. If not to stand eye-to-eye with royalty, what else were 1776 and all that about?
But Bill Clinton wasn’t the only one whose sense of international etiquette was questioned in 1994; in fact, plenty of scorn was shoveled forth for Nancy Reagan regarding, you guessed it, an alleged curtsy to the Queen of England. The Times even printed a quote from Miss Manners to demonstrate the wrongness of such a thing when Lenore Annenberg of the State Department dared curtsy to the Queen.
There was that curtsy, during the Reagan years, when Lenore Annenberg, herself the chief of protocol, forgot herself entirely and did a little dip to greet a visiting Prince Charles. That prompted a stern warning from Miss Manners against those who might mock the effort that “was once put into freeing Americans from the necessity of bending their knees.”
So where is all the outrage now? Why did Reagan, Clinton, and Annenberg catch hell for what President Obama has gotten a free pass for? Why, in particular, is the New York Times utterly silent 15 years later as President Obama bows to a tyrant who enforces the death penalty for pretty much every crime including the terrible ones of being a woman without a head covering, a girl going to school, and drinking alcohol? And why is the outrage so much higher for Administration officials who dared show similar amounts of respect to the Queen of England, the monarch of the country in the world we can most rely on to be our ally when we need one?
Two possible reasons:
1. It’s President Obama, and the New York Times, despite sharpening its fangs for eight years on the Bush Administration and reminding us that it’s the media’s place to be adversarial to the leadership of the country, has no intention of ever being adversarial to President Obama lest they lose their leftwing membership card.
2. He bowed to a Muslim who rules the country that happens to house Mecca. Making a bigger issue out of this might be construed as supporting the yokels who think Obama is some kind of secret Muslim, and furthering the idea that we’re now being ruled by a secret cabal of Muslims trying to reinstate the Caliphate (for more about those kinds of folks, see here; graphic language).
Whatever the reason, the Times has proven its consistency again. Barack Obama can do no wrong, and that’s the bottom line.