re: #340 RogueOne

Did you miss that whole 200 years part?

There’s an enormous difference between “need not” and “does not.”

Assuming this is even correct. I don’t see anything on the State Department website to this effect, although it’s certainly possible I missed it. Feel free to provide a reference, as I’m sure there will be all sorts of other useful information regarding this topic to be found at the same location.

As for the ancestry and tradition thing, I’ll say it again: it’s bullshit.

I grew up in Detroit - Highland Park, actually, just blocks away from the original Ford assembly line and the Chrysler Manufacturing Facility and world headquarters at the time. The neighborhood was absolutely packed with immigrants - from Poland, Romania, Czechoslovakia, Italy, Germany, Ireland, Scotland and just about every other European country you could name. My own great-grandparents arrived from Germany, Ireland and Scotland. During my lifetime, I’ve lived closely with Jews from many points of origin, Arabs, Mexicans, people from various points of Central and South America, and I’ve also managed to brush up against people from all the other countries not already listed long enough to chat them up and get a feel for.

In all that time and experience, I have never even once heard anyone suggest that bowing is out of order or subservient, whether done by the President or by anyone else. Not on a single occasion.

This is a fiction invented just months ago in order to manufacture outrage directed at 0bama during his visit to the Middle East. It has absolutely no basis in fact that I can find, anywhere, and my own experience is substantial enough to convince me that few - if any - people hold it as a result of long-standing tradition or custom or protocol.

In fact, it is perhaps the most jingoistic statement I’ve run across at this site, and to be blunt, I find it offensive in the extreme.