White House: Obama didn’t bow to Saudi king

A mild stir was created last week during the G20 summit when it appeared that President Obama bowed to King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia, a breach of diplomatic protocol that didn’t sit well with some. The commotion, which had pretty much died down over the weekend, flared back today with a vengeance when the White House tried to convince us that President Obama didn’t bow to the king at all, but merely had to stoop to shake the king’s hand.

Honestly, last week I thought the story was a little interesting, but I was willing to chalk up the ill-advised guesture to Obama’s naivete of protocol. Now, however, the White House seems determined to make sure we call an apple an orange. Above you can see the picture of Obama “stooping” to the king. Not particularly damning, I know, as it’s a bit unclear what he’s doing.

Unfortunately, there’s also video of the encounter at HotAir and at the Anchoress’ site, and multiple places on YouTube. Sorry, but it looks like a bow to me.

Again, the bow itself doesn’t enrage me and set me on the warpath. It does irk me a little, as it did when President Bush kissed and held hands with the Saudi king a few years ago, because while our leaders should show respect to other leaders, they don’t need to show such fawning deference, particularly to the leader of a country as repressive as Saudi Arabia.

No, the response of the White House bothers me much more than the act itself. The smart thing to do would have been to just let the story die on its own, or if you are forced to make comment, laugh it off as a rookie mistake that won’t be repeated in the future. Instead, the White House is telling us to disbelieve our own eyes, as if they’re pulling some sort of Jedi mind trick on the nation. (“This isn’t the bow to the Saudi king you were looking for…”) Such a blatant manipulation of obvious facts, over so small and insignificant a matter as this, doesn’t speak well to the much-vaunted openness and transparency of this administration.

Congressional Democrats fawn over Castro

Seven members of the Congressional Black Caucus returned from their trip to Havana singing the praises of their gracious host, Fidel Castro. Rep. Bobby Rush said talking to Castro was “like talking to an old friend,” and he told the dictator around the Rush household Castro is known as “the ultimate survivor.” Castro evidently wants to do all he can to help Obama succeed (unlike Rush and those mean ol’ conservatives, see? Castro’s not unpatriotic like them! /sarcasm). The claim impressed Rep. Laura Richardson, who gushed that Castro knew her name and district and looked right into her eyes. And remarkably, Rep. Emanuel Cleaver, in an interview on NPR, said he saw no repression in Cuba.

The purpose of the trip was to highlight the need for revisiting the Cuban trade embargo, but the delegation ended up turning the Castros into heroes. Michelle Malkin gives the group her Commie Stooges of the Day Award, and Miami Herald columnist Myriam Marquez calls them the Clueless Seven.

The fact is that the Congressional delegation spent no time in the real Cuba, instead being entertained and fed a narrative by their oh-so-delightful hosts. It’s similar to when Sean Penn gave the Castros the rosy-glasses treatment after swinging through Venezuela and then wrote a sickeningly sweet love letter to Chavez and the Castros on Salon.com. The claim is made that these leaders are so fantastically popular that they’d win an election anyway. But that’s the point – that claim is never put to the test. It’s simply amazing to me that politicians and activists are willing to overlook the murderous and tyrannical pasts of dictators, claiming they’re just misunderstood. But the folks who don’t misunderstand the Castros are the 300 political prisoners in Cuban prisons, and the millions of Cubans who have yet to vote in an open election for their political leadership. The display put on by the Congressional delegation is atrociously embarrassing and tragically uncalled for.

Obama administration considers “climate engineering”

It sounds like something out of science fiction, but President Obama’s science advisor John Holdren today raised the idea of artificially engineering Earth’s climate to combat global warming. One way of doing this, he says, is shooting pollution particles into the upper atmosphere to reflect the sun’s rays via an artificial volcano. He’s raised the issue, which he frames as a last-ditch effort only, in administration meetings on the subject of climate change.

The scheme reads like something out of an old Buck Rogers serial, but most assuredly it’s not a joke.The notion that humans have the ability to radically and intentionally the atmosphere is to confer upon the human race God-like powers which it doesn’t warrant, and to assume that, if we could, we would “geoengineer” the planet with any degree of wisdom or foresight is a stretch of the imagination. And even though there is nothing approaching scientific consensus on climate change, I won’t debate here the far from proven claims of global warming alarmists. It is my own belief that the issue is being trumpeted and over-hyped as yet another means of forcing government control over society in the name of being green-friendly. In any case, “geoengineering” sounds to me like another harebrained pie in the sky plan that ought to quickly find its place in the trash bin of ideas.

Crew of hijacked ship regains control from Somali pirates, captain still held

In another shocking act of piracy off the coast of Somalia, pirates hijacked the American cargo vessel Maersk Alabama, the first time in 200 years a US vessel has fallen victim. But in a new development, the 20-man crew has retaken the vessel after a struggle, while it seems the captain is still being held in the ship’s lifeboat. Let’s keep him in our prayers and hope he makes it back safely. Meanwhile, I’m glad to see that US warships and air assets are en route to the scene. It’s been a tactic in the past for pirates to slink back into Somalia’s territorial waters 13 miles out from the coast, where foreign navies must stop, and wait for permission from Somalia’s ineffectual government to proceed.

It wasn’t that long when we began to become more aware of the piracy situation in and around the Gulf of Aden. While it’s in the pirates’ best interests to make sure commerce still flows through the region, they’ll have no compunction about violence if their needs aren’t met. It seems many of the crew recognized the threat of piracy was very real before they set out, and I applaud them for their courage in taking back their ship from these maritime criminals. Other vessels haven’t been as lucky, and no matter how this crisis is resolved, the shipping lanes around the Horn of Africa will continue to be plagued by lawlessness.