Hey, Barry: Americans don't bow to monarchs

I’ve now watched the tape of Obama’s bow a dozen or more times. It is simply not possible to accept an anonymous White House official’s insistence that Obama was merely reaching down to take the king’s hand and had to bend over because of the height difference.

Not to name drop, but I’ve met the king and I’ve met the president. We’re not talking Gulliver and the Lilliputians. Even if Obama needed to reach down for the king’s hand, why not let the king raise his hand of his own volition? When I shook hands with the king, he seemed to know what to do.

To any objective observer, Obama’s bend from the waist quacked like a duck. It was . . . a bow. Clumsy, embarrassing and unbecoming a president, yes, but not an act of treason or, as one newspaper put it, a gesture of “fealty to a foreign potentate.”