As the American Chief of State, the president is a living symbol of the nation. It is considered a great honor for any citizen to shake the president’s hand.
So begins an article hosted by Scholastic press, outlining the first of seven roles of the president.
I’ve never been one for pomp and ceremony, and would have said this was the least important of the many tasks assigned to the executive branch. Throwing out the first baseball pitch, attending funerals of world leaders, hosting state dinners, pitching an agenda for the coming year at factories and schools. Pure tradition.
Yet the congressional disrespect shown the president during the State of the Union speech is disconcerting, as is the invitation to the Prime Minister of Israel to speak before Congress, not by the president but by Congress itself.
Ceremony and tradition, I find, has its place.
I understand the frustration of those congressmen and women who applauded when the president said he wasn’t running for re-election.
I did the happy dance myself when President George Bush the Second walked out of the oval office. What a relief that was!
Had President Bush mentioned not running again, and I was a member of Congress, I would have applauded. Of course, I’m not a member of Congress, and as a citizen I found that behavior depressing, maybe even dangerous.
Congress is supposed to have a formal respect for the office, much like we “all rise” when the judge enters the courtroom and takes the bench — even if we have no respect for the man himself, or know him or her to be a scoundrel.
For Congress to openly “dis” the president is to state, publicly, that our system of government is a sham with no substance. Which I’ve long suspected.
Nixon and Watergate, Reagan and his Contras, Clinton and his blue dress, Bush and his oil, Bush and his war, Obama and his “no boots on the ground” assurances. The scandals and lies don’t endear me to the office.
But while I shook my head and sighed, in the back of my mind I knew that heroes and world leaders were shaking the president’s hand, truly honored. Pomp and ceremony at least gave the appearance of stateliness in Washington D.C., gave hope that the infighting and power-grubbing political elites could at least “do the pretty,” pretend, for an hour or two, that they were committed to a higher purpose.
No such luck, I guess.
Global chaos and uncertainty reign, despite what you heard in President Barack Obama’s Jan. 20 State of the Union address.
Although his speech was full of empty rhetoric, the immediate concern of many media outlets was the “rudeness” displayed by Republicans, who clapped when Obama mentioned that his presidency is drawing to a close.
Liberals seemed more irate about the “disrespect” of the GOP than Obama downplaying national security threats.
His latest showdown with Congress involves a plan to ramp up negotiations with Iran, a country that has been a perpetual source of terrorist activity since 1979.
GOP leaders contend that negotiations with Iran have been intermittent since the 1950s and produced little positive results. The longstanding strategy of Iranian leaders has been pretty simple — keep the U.S. talking until the warheads are operational.
Republicans and many Democrats argue that the only hope of success in a new round of negotiations with Iranian President Hassan Rouhani is to tie sanctions to non-compliance.
Because Obama is unwilling to discuss sanctions and the stakes are so high — Iran has vowed destruction of the U.S. and Israel — House Speaker John Boehner invited Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to address Congress in February.
Israel’s leader will provide his nation’s viewpoint about the negotiations. Obama and his top cohorts intend to snub Netanyahu because the invitation to visit did not come from the White House.
Shortly after the president took credit in the State of the Union for “halting” Iran’s progress with the manufacture of nukes, a satellite image on Israel’s Channel 2 News showed a 90-foot-long intercontinental ballistic missile on a launch pad near the Iranian capital of Tehran. The existence of the missile demonstrated the fallacy of the president’s claim and the looming danger from Iran.
Add this latest travesty to the president’s continual end-runs around Congress to get his own way on policies and I’m thinking the GOP applause was well-mannered.
Remember when the Democrats booed and heckled President George W. Bush at his 2005 State of the Union?
The president isn’t a figurehead; he is given a constitutional role that is vital to our safety and security. He is to serve as commander-in-chief and to “faithfully execute” the laws passed by Congress.
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