More bowing

This time, the Chinese. Diss our friends and bow to the opposition. Read over at NRO:

Bowing should not matter either. Obama did not bow to the Queen of England, but rather sent her I-pod photos of himself; yet he did kowtow to a Saudi royal, a Japanese emperor, and now a Chinese head of state. Like it or not, the image conveyed is that an American president defers to non-Western royalty and grandees in a way that is supposed to suggest, in symbolic fashion, that America is just one of many countries, without much exceptional about it and without much of an affinity for the West.

If multilateralism was the objective, it came out instead as obsequious deference. Whereas Bush's backrubs and Carter's frontal kisses were reflective of American casualness and too much informality, the bowing seems for some reason a far more bothersome gaffe. And as with Obama's apologies, what we thought was a one-time slip turns out to be a systematic pattern that reflects an apparent worldview.