{"id":7957,"date":"2006-07-18T09:10:05","date_gmt":"2006-07-18T13:10:05","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.thecarpetbaggerreport.com\/archives\/7957.html"},"modified":"2006-07-18T09:10:05","modified_gmt":"2006-07-18T13:10:05","slug":"bush-shows-his-affection-for-german-chancellor-angela-merkel","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/bush-shows-his-affection-for-german-chancellor-angela-merkel\/","title":{"rendered":"Bush shows his affection for German Chancellor Angela Merkel"},"content":{"rendered":"

Here’s how the LA Times described<\/a> one of the stranger moments I’ve seen in a long while between two heads of state.<\/p>\n

Entering the meeting room, as relayed by a Russian television camera, [tag]Bush[\/tag] headed directly behind [German Chancellor [tag]Angela Merkel[\/tag]], reached out and, placing both hands on the collar of her gold jacket, gave her a short [tag]massage[\/tag] just below the neck.<\/p>\n

She smiled.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Well, she sort of smiled; it’s hard to tell. C&L has video<\/a> and Taylor Marsh has a series of still shots<\/a> showing Bush, for no apparent reason, approaching [tag]Merkel[\/tag] and giving her a quick [tag]neck[\/tag] and [tag]shoulder[\/tag] rub. Now, I’m not an expert in diplomacy. It’s possible that these kinds of things happen all the time. It’s equally possible that Merkel thought there was nothing to this and it’ll all be forgotten quickly.<\/p>\n

But this nevertheless strikes me as troubling. As Dibgy put it<\/a>, “This woman is the [tag]Chancellor[\/tag] of [tag]Germany[\/tag].” Indeed, she’s entitled to a high degree of respect and decorum, not a rub-down from a frat-boy in chief.
\n
\nI hesitate to make too big a deal out of this, and most of the U.S. media ignored it completely, but I’ve long believed there are certain standards for how one behaves in professional settings. If this were a meeting of corporate executives, and a male CEO from one major company began giving an uninvited massage to a female CEO from another company, it’d be considered inappropriate, as I believe it should.<\/p>\n

Given the past several days, Bush’s trip to St. Petersburg has been quite a diplomatic coup, hasn’t it? He’s responded to questions about the Middle East with a preoccupation about a pig<\/a>; he was embarrassed by Putin<\/a> about the state of Iraq’s democracy; he was accidentally recorded<\/a> making a series of strange remarks; and he had this bizarre run-in with Merkel.<\/p>\n

Makes you proud, doesn’t it?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Here’s how the LA Times described one of the stranger moments I’ve seen in a long while between two heads of state. Entering the meeting room, as relayed by a Russian television camera, [tag]Bush[\/tag] headed directly behind [German Chancellor [tag]Angela Merkel[\/tag]], reached out and, placing both hands on the collar of her gold jacket, gave […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[617],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-7957","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-general"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7957","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=7957"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7957\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=7957"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=7957"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=7957"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}