In a formal setting, the President of the United States met the emperor of Japan and the President bowed, which he is not accustomed to doing. Emperor Akihito shook hands, which he is not accustomed to doing. All were polite and all went on with the rest of the meeting like the figure heads always do, but that was not the end. Not when our infamous Barack Obama is involved, and not when our ill-fed press has a slow day.
Five seconds after the video of the customary greeting, the bashing began. Fox News, who took a poll to see what the “American public thought of the bow.” To my surprise, 26 percent said that it is never okay to bow.
You say it’s never ok? When you are talking to a person that has grown up bowing to people they respect, much like we shake hands with the people we respect, are you sure you are not going to show respect in return?
It is customary foreign policy to show courtesy and awareness of other leaders’ religious and customary gestures. Above all else, the leader of our country is going to meet with other countries to prevent an incident, to stop all useless arguing and continue global trade. Somewhere in the translation of our president and the image of Obama we have lost what it means to be a leader.
He has to do things like bowing or we will suffer, fight and possibly die. That is the fact we deal with when our country decided to not shut itself off, like many founding fathers wanted. If for some other-worldly reason we did not rely on global trade, then yes, absolutely snub whoever you want. But until that day, you had better watch your step, mister.
But all facts and any sense were pushed aside when every Web site and television show immediately started talking nonstop about how “Barack Obama bowed at a 90 degree angle to the Emperor of Japan.”
Hearing this made my blood boil. If by some great misfortune Obama did not bow to the Emperor, we just might be fried little cookies right now. I mean they owe us a good one and they have the ammunition, so thank you Barack. You did me a solid.
Also, did you not happen to notice our president is more than six feet tall? It takes a “tall” man to bow to someone shorter than him. But I guess no one in this barbaric country seems to understand the man is doing the best he can to strike deals with another country to dig us out of our whispered depression.
Even an admiral gets it. “That’s what one does when one sees the emperor of Japan. I don’t care if it’s the President of the United States or the commander of 325,000 Americans,” Admiral Timothy Keating told a forum at the Center for Strategic and International Studies.
The uneducated masses just seem to look at our “savior” putting himself in a spot where he is not looking down on others as a symbol of surrender. A bow is respectful, if for no other reason than courtesy.
I wonder if for one second the people who blew this out of proportion could stop looking at viewer statistics and take a look at where the U.S. is in the global community. They would shake with fear and bow to the Emperor of Japan at a 100 degree angle because they would clearly see they are a much better-off country on an economic and manufacturing stand point.
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