Obama's Trip To Southeast Asia A National Embarrassment

Cambodia's First Lady Bun Rany gives Obama a "sampeah" greeting reserved for  servants

President Barack Obama's trip this past week to Southeast Asia was nothing short of a national embarrassment, although you won't read or hear anything about how badly he performed in the lamestream media, which has nothing but "oohs" and "aahs" for him. Investors Business Daily doesn't cut him any slack, however, describing the trip as "pretty much all style over substance"--"a Potemkin mission abroad."  The President still earns low points on style. He repeatedly mispronounced Burma Prime Minister Aung San Suu Kyi's name during a joint appearance with her, which IBD finds to be "an astonishing error given her global fame" as a Nobel Peace Prize winner. One would think that a man who grew up in Indonesia would have an advantage over other American leaders in pronouncing Asian names. He also used poor form in addressing the country's president, insulting him in the process. Obama's visit to Burma was supposedly for the purpose of promoting representative government, but he suggested to Burmese leaders that he wished he could impose his will on Congress. In Thailand, he trivialized his trip by "flirting around" with the country's attractive Prime Minister Yingluck Shinawatra and visiting tourist traps. He got royally dissed in Cambodia by the country's First Lady, when she "greeted Obama with a traditional 'sampeah' pressed-hands greeting reserved for servants, a little dig that was probably lost on him but not to Asians." If President Bush had made such mistakes during a foreign trip, we would be hearing about it for months.