The Vacuum Of American Leadership

Investors.com ^ | November 20, 2009 | MARK STEYN

[Kaslin]

My radio pal Hugh Hewitt said to me on the air the other day that Barack Obama "doesn't know how to be president." It was a low but effective crack, and I didn't pay it much heed. But, after musing on it over the last week or so, it seems to me frighteningly literally true.

I don't just mean social lapses like his latest cringe-making bow, this time to Their Imperial Majesties The Emperor and Empress of Japan — though that in itself is deeply weird: After the world superbower's previous nose-to-toe prostration before the Saudi King, one assumed there'd be someone in the White House to point out tactfully that the citizen-executives of the American republic don't bow to foreign monarchs.

Along with his choreographic gaucherie goes his peculiar belief that all of human history is just a bit of colorful back story in the Barack Obama biopic — or as he put it in his video address on the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall: "Few would have foreseen on that day that a united Germany would be led by a woman from Brandenburg or that their American ally would be led by a man of African descent."

Tear down that wall . . . so they can get a better look at me!!!

Is there no-one in the White House grown-up enough to say, "Er, Mr. President, that's really the kind of line you get someone else to say about you"?

[thulldud]

As in "water buffalo"?

Paging Eden Jacobowitz....

[SuziQ]

*snort* Empty suit, indeed.