With the leaders of France, Germany and NATO slapping President Barack Obama around, and Obama undermining U.S. sovereignty at every turn, he would have done better to conduct his world tour via GoToMeeting.com.

The New York Post’s Ralph Peters writes that Obama’s “real performance came in Turkey. And it was a turkey”:

Obama means well. Just as Jimmy Carter, his policy godfather, meant well. But the road to embassy takeovers and strategic humiliation is paved with good intentions - coupled with distressing naivete. …

In Turkey, he surrendered our national pride, undercut our interests and interfered in matters that aren't his business. …

The Europeans don't want Turkey in their club. Because Turkey isn't a European state, nor is its culture European. And it isn't our business to press Europe to embrace a huge, truculent Muslim country suffering a creeping Islamist coup. …

Obama has no idea what's going on in Turkey. By going to Ankara on his knees, he gave his seal of approval to a pungently anti-American Islamist government bent on overturning Mustapha Kemal's legacy of the separation of mosque and state. …

Insisting that America's always guilty, Obama omitted any mention of Turkey's wartime betrayals of our troops, its continuing oppression of its Kurd minority or the AKP's determination to turn a state with a secular constitution into a Wahhabi playground.

When it came to the Armenian genocide, Obama bravely ducked: He never dared use the g-word.

Taking issue with our president’s “obsessive need” to call Americans “arrogant” every chance he got, American Thinker’s James Lewis wonders if Obama “every [sic] really talked to a concentration camp survivor, or a Cuban refugee, or a boat person from Vietnam? Or a Soviet dissident. Or a survivor or Mao's purges”:

Yes, he's going to Normandie, but will he apologize for our arrogance there, too? Does he really understand anything beyond the PC history of the world? Or will he just lie in his photo op at the American Cemetery at Normandy?

Ahhh, those arrogant Americans. First they rebel against King George III and all the crowned heads of Europe. Then they welcome tens of millions of poor and persecuted people from the Old World. Then they fail to bow down to Europe's greatest figures - from Napoleon and Otto von Bismarck to the Kaiser, Hitler and Stalin. Then they fight a civil war, losing half a million people to liberate black people in America. …

What arrogance these Americans have. Either that, or a very, very - no, stunningly - ignorant man was just elected president - largely because millions of benevolent voters believed that we owe black people a presidency. They may come to see that as their biggest mistake ever. 

How ignorant? Here’s The London Telegraph’s Toby Hamden on Obama’s understanding of “American exceptionalism":

In his G20 press conference in London, he said that he believed in "American exceptionalism" but then reduced the cherished notion that Americans are a special people because of their institutions and origins to mere patriotism. "Just as I suspect that the Brits believe in British exceptionalism and the Greeks believe in Greek exceptionalism.

Unfortunately, he chose to cite two countries whose empires crumbled to dust.

But then, Obama thinks that Austrians speak “Austrian.” No wonder former U.S. ambassador to the U.N. John Bolton says Obama needs “additional schooling.” Here’s what he told Greta Van Susteren in an interview last night:

I was shocked at how poor his knowledge of history is. If he thinks tensions between Europe and the United States are of recent vintage, particularly during the Bush administration, he really needs some additional schooling.

If you go back to the time of the Revolution, there have been differences between Europeans and Americans very reminiscent of things we've seen in more recent years. If you read the diaries and letters of the British and American top political and military leaders in World War II, they were at each other's throats. Lord Allenbrook, the British commander, didn't think Dwight Eisenhower was fit to be Supreme Commander or Americans were fit to fight.

This goes back and forth all the time. The idea that, suddenly, he's going to change this as a matter of attitude is itself a form of arrogance on his part.

Van Susteren wanted to know “When is a difference of opinion among nations or between nations - when is that arrogant? At what point?” Bolton’s answer:

When people's interests change, their approaches, their policies change. And it's not just a question of the United States having a dismissive attitude toward Europe. I'll just you [sic] one quotation from French Prime Minister George Clemenceau during World War I, where he said, America is the only nation in history which miraculously has gone directly from barbarism to degeneration without the usual interval of civilization. How's that for arrogant?

Bolton’s assessment of Obama: “I really don't know that he has yet adjusted to being president.”

For her part, Camille Paglia - no right-winger, she – blames Obama’s foreign affairs missteps on “a total vacuum where a chief of protocol should be” which led to a “costly breakdown in basic command of protocol”:

There has been one needless gaffe after another - from the president's tacky appearance on a late-night comedy show to the kitsch gifts given to the British prime minister, followed by the sweater-clad first lady's over-familiarity with the queen and culminating in the jaw-dropping spectacle of a president of the United States bowing to the king of Saudi Arabia. Why was protest about the latter indignity confined to conservatives? The silence of the major media was a disgrace.

Obama’s obeisance (video link) to the king of the country in which Mecca is located, raises the question of whether America has unwittingly elected its first Muslim president. Obama has not stepped foot in a church since he took the oath of office, and he keeps talking about getting a dog but thus far the unclean creature has not befouled his domicile.

Editorial Note: The White House claims that Obama did not bow before King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia, but compare the slight nod of the head (video link) he gave to the much shorter Queen Elizabeth II. As American Spectator columnist Lisa Fabrizio puts it, “Not just a curt lowering of the head, but a full-waist bow that I've only seen done by Catholics in front of the Blessed Sacrament.”

Dead Voter, Dead Candidate

Stephen Wroblewski of Milwaukee, WI, is admitting to voter fraud for casting an absentee ballot in his wife Jacqueline’s name, reports The Associated Press. He says it was his Dem activist wife’s dying wish, but then contradicts himself by noting that she would have disapproved of what he did because  she "was a stickler for the rules." In any case, he came clean about the illegal vote after he found out that his wife’s ballot was being challenged.

Meanwhile in MO, live voters in the town of Winfield re-elected their dead mayor for a fourth term, reports AP:

Ballots had already been printed and absentee voting had already begun when Harry Stonebraker died of a heart attack at age 69 on March 11. He won easily in Tuesday's general election with 206 votes, or 90 percent. Alderman Bernie Panther got the other 23 votes.

The town’s aldermen will appoint a mayor until a special election in April 2010 to elect a mayor to serve out the two-year term.

Equal Opportunity Offensiveness

During the campaign, The Stiletto noted that a new “ism” needed to be coined to describe the disrespect and sexual objectification to which then-vice presidential candidate Gov. Sarah Palin (R-AK) was subjected. Well Palin - now a grandmother - is still being depicted as a scantily clad curvaceous vixen. But in what could be regarded as a twisted form of equality of the sexes, a new comic book series is depicting President Barack Obama as a muscle-bound scantily clad “barbarian” superhero, reports The Daily Mail of London: 

[Hat Tip: The FOX Forum blogger Jim Pinkerton]

You’re Invited To The New Agenda’s Forum On Violence Against Women

The New Agenda will hold a forum on Violence Against Women in NYC at the Benjamin Hotel (125 E 50^th Street) on Saturday, April 18, 2009, from 3-5pm. The panel discussion and cocktail party that follows (complimentary hors d’oeuvres, cash bar) are free of charge, though donations to The New Agenda are welcome. Please RSVP to: tnavawforum@yahoo.com

Editorial Note: In a post on The Daily Beast about NY State Senator Hiram Monserrate (D-Queens) being indicted on six counts of assault (four security cameras in his Jackson Heights apartment building captured his alleged assault of his girlfriend on tape) The New Agenda co-founder Amy Siskind asks: “[W]hy is he still welcome in the state senate?” Why indeed?