If you haven’t heard the latest about the curfuffle involving Obama and the visit by English PM Gordon Brown, apparently Obama’s so-called “smarter diplomacy” ain’t so smart. According to reports Obama committed a serious diplomatic faux pas by snubbing the PM with no state dinner, no joint press conference and a crappy gift that I would be pissed about if my own grandma gave me. Exchanging gifts amongst diplomats is an age old custom, here is a description of the exchange between Brown and Obama: Mr Brown handed over carefully selected gifts, including a pen holder made from the wood of a warship that helped stamp out the slave trade - a sister ship of the vessel from which timbers were taken to build Mr Obama’s Oval Office desk. Mr Obama’s gift in return, a collection of Hollywood film DVDs that could have been bought from any high street store, looked like the kind of thing the White House might hand out to the visiting head of a minor African state.

Glenn Beck - Obama administration: Arrogance and Ignorance


To make matters worse they were probably Region 1 DVDs and Brown is blind in one eye and going blind in the other, great gift Obama. In response to this apparent slight, the Obama administration stated that they “overwhelmed” by the economic crisis and “too tired” to think of a decent gift. How tired do you have to be to send some dude to Best Buy to buy a crappy gift? I’m guessing Obama must be utterly exhausted. So, maybe this is no big deal, but it gets better. In response to this idiotic exchange of gifts, a state department official stated:

Mr Obama rang Mr Brown as he flew home, in what many suspected was an attempt to make amends.The real views of many in Obama administration were laid bare by a State Department official involved in planning the Brown visit, who reacted with fury when questioned by The Sunday Telegraph about why the event was so low-key. The official dismissed any notion of the special relationship, saying: “There’s nothing special about Britain. You’re just the same as the other 190 countries in the world. You shouldn’t expect special treatment.”

For the smartest administration evah these guys sure are stupid. There is nothing special about Great Britain? Our mother-country, our greatest ally, one of our great trading partners, the country who’s freaking troops have been dying along side us in Iraq, there is nothing special about them? They are just the same as Cuba, North Korea or Russia??? Are these guys crazy?

If the administration had just come out and said “hey, we made a mistake, we’ll try to get better at diplomatic protocol in the future” then maybe we could forgive them and cut them slack. However, this statement makes it look like they were on a mission to intentionally insult our greatest and oldest ally. Maybe this is what Biden meant last fall when he said “we are going to be tested”. It is going to be a real test when North Korea decides to blast Seol, or China decides they really want Taiwan back, and the Obama administration suddenly finds that they have no friends and no allies to stand up to these thugs. Then again, he probably doesn’t want to any way. The source.... Read about Barack Obama too tired to give proper welcome to Gordon Brown