Barack Obama: Spiritual leader of the British

Previously published by Blogcritics

It's odd. I know there are conservative people in Britain. But they're like God: I need faith that they actually exist, because, aside from my wife, I have never met anyone who came even remotely close to scoring 0.001 percent on the conservative scale.
I've certainly never worked with any. A good example came last week when the Daily Express arrived to the scanning room where a younger co-worker and I were stationed. The headline announced "40 Percent Rise in Ethnic Numbers." My immediate thought upon reading the headline was, This is not good for social cohesion. My colleague, however, gruffly stated, "Let's leave this paper with its racist headline till last."
Its racist headline? Score another point for the rose-colored glasses wearing, blue-sky thinking crowd, because that kid is clearly part of it. Who cares if foreign influx into the country is so high that we quickly find ourselves possessing no common language, cultural references or shared values with each other? We should care. After all, don't the British complain incessantly about the "Americanization" of their culture? Alas, I suppose it's far easier and more fashionable to complain about American words infiltrating Brit-speak (which are actually English words that Americans preserved) than how closely British immigration policy—or lack of it—resembles that of the U.S.
Why exactly do I bring this up? Sky News reported that President Obama signed the Westminster Abbey guestbook but dated his comment "May 24, 2008." A harmless gaffe, but do you know what the reaction to the story would have been had George W. Bush done that? It would have been proclaimed the dumbest mistake in the history of mankind. Reader comments would have declared: "Further proof the President's an idiot," "The American people deserve this man," "George Bush, worst president evah," and peppered throughout by the occasional but obligatory "GEORGE BUSH WAR CRIMINAL!"
It should come as no surprise that the reaction to the Obama story was all "peace," "love" and "what's the big deal?"

Give up nit picking [sic], so what he made a mistake with the date [sic], I think the President is a great guy and doing a grand job. It was lovely to see him and his wife at Buckingham Palace with the Queen.

What is it, fashionable to hate on Obama now?

Which only goes to show he is also human and open to the same effects of media exposure and jetlag!! Good for him.

you all are hatters. [sic] why don't you get a life. [sic] We all make mistakes. who haven't? [sic] put your hands up. leave the poor man alone people [sic].

And on, and on, and on the Obama bum-kissing goes, for over 1,000 mind-numbing, grammatically appalling comments. Suddenly it's fashionable in Britain to stick up for the American President. And golly gee, aren't those Yanks nice, cuddly people for electing him too? The world's such a snuggly-wuggly place!
The world's not coming to an end just because Barack Obama signed the wrong year to his guestbook entry. I get that. It's to be expected, I suppose. The man has never stopped campaigning, after all. That's why he's hardly ever in the office he got elected to. He's living in a perpetual 2008. One of these days, he's going to say that's when he had Osama bin Laden executed.
But doesn't it speak volumes about a man who pronounced corpsman as "corpseman," said he visited 57 U.S. states, and thinks Austrian is spoken in Austria? Are we going to have a book on Obama-isms to join the volumes of tomes dedicated to Bushisms?
How about Mr. Obama completely screwing up while delivering a toast to the Queen? The band is instructed to play when they hear "the Queen." That's their cue. Obama and his defenders will try to blame the orchestra, when the truth is, Obama never should have spoken those words until the end of his speech.
I ask again, if Dubya had done this, what would the reaction have been? Of course, Bush never would have fouled up like that for he would have pulled all the stops to get it right before speaking. He would have bothered to study the protocol. Beautiful people like Barack Obama, however, have no need for that because their brilliance is beyond the reach of normal people. Or so we're told, time and time again by the fawning media, both American and international.
What really throws me is the completely fake bonhomie that Obama is presenting to the Queen, David Cameron and the British people themselves. Obama is a notorious Brit-hater. Nile Gardiner spelled it all out in his commentary "Does Obama Have it in for Britain?":

Obama seems strangely oblivious to the dangerous path he has embarked on, becoming the first U.S. President in modern times to place no importance on the historic relationship between the U.S. and Britain.
We cannot say, however, that we weren't warned.
This, after all, is a man who, within days of being sworn in as President, ordered that a bust of Winston Churchill—a gift from the British people to the U.S. in the dark days that followed 9/11—be removed from the Oval Office.
... When the U.S. marches in, it's only ever the British who can be depended on to march alongside them.
And yet all that proud history, all that noble sacrifice, seems to count for nothing in Obama's eyes. He seems oblivious to the debt of gratitude he, and the American people, owes this country.

Despite that, Obama is enormously popular in this country. The British talk a good game about being different from Europeans, but the President's popularity numbers continue to hover between the 75 to 80 percent mark, as with France and Germany. Obama might very well declare in the House of Commons, "Screw it, I'm not pretending to like you anymore. You're all evil and you should consider yourselves lucky if I don't nuke you all to hell where you belong." Sky News would report it, and you'd still have Brits commenting, "Come on, take it easy on the President. He's a wonderful man, the most brilliant in all of history. He wants to teach the world to sing in perfect harmony," only without the punctuation or capital letters.
I learned years ago that a strong, confident America is not what the world, including Britain, wants—and everyone can relax because that's certainly not something the world is going to witness under the present administration. But this is ridiculous. I'd have an easier time finding a unicorn or gryphon walking the streets of Britain than I would someone who isn't an Obamabot, to use Ted Rall's appropriate term. I prefer the phrase "Obama rumpswab," but that would be politically incorrect, now wouldn't it?