Swompdonkey

Americans Don't Bow to Foreign Potentates!

uh...

except when they do. From the excellent Miniseries John Adams:



Of course, performing courtesies to the representative of a thousand-year-old royal dynasty is one thing. Bowing and scraping to the son of history's luckiest desert raider is entirely another!

Interestingly, I recall someone saying that Obama is the first President in a very long time whose father was a British subject. So maybe Britain's complicated history in Kenya has something to do with his relative coolness towards his father's colonial overlords.