-By Warner Todd Huston
If the snub of British PM Gordon Brown at the hands of President Obama and his wife weren’t enough, now British Cabinet Secretary Sir Gus O’Donnell is saying that Downing Street is finding it “unbelievably difficult” to get hold of officials from Obama’s administration. British officials can’t seem to ever get past the administration’s answer machines as they call here to try and coordinate plans for the coming G20 summit.
In frustration O’Donnell said that that when he tries to get in touch with key members of Obama’s Treasury Department “there is nobody there.” The phones ring and nobody answers or they get messages and that is all. “You cannot believe how difficult it is,” O’Donnell told participants at a civil service conference.
While the Obama Administration ducks the Brit’s phone calls, the U.S. media also seems to be ignoring this story as they’ve widely ignored several of the stories that detail the new administration’s offhanded treatment of our closest ally.
Attempting to re-spin O’Donnell’s pique, Downing Street replied by reiterating that the relationship between Britain and the Obama administration is perfectly fine. Officials also claimed that O’Donnell was critiquing the American system of replacing key officials with each new administration.
The Old Media in this country, though, seems uninterested in this story. This isn’t surprising because they’ve been systematically ignoring many of the stories coming from England detailing the deteriorating relations between the Obama administration and British representatives.
First Obama dissed the Brits by summarily returning her generous loan of a bust of Churchill to adorn the Oval Office. Along with the gift gaffes that Michelle and Barack perpetrated when the Brown’s visited and the Obama official that told British authorities that they weren’t “special” to the U.S., this story is all over the European media but is not making much of a splash on this side of the Atlantic.
One has to wonder why the Old Media in the U.S. is not too interested in these stories of how Obama is dissing the Brits? Could it be that President Obama is not living up to the campaign promise that he’d “fix” our international relations and that truth does not appeal to the delicate sensibilities of the U.S. media?
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Warner Todd Huston is a Chicago based freelance writer, has been writing opinion editorials and social criticism since early 2001 and is featured on many websites such as newsbusters.org, Human Events Magazine, townhall.com, New Media Journal, Men’s News Daily and the New Media Alliance among many, many others. Additionally, he has been a frequent guest on talk-radio programs to discuss his opinion editorials and current events. He has also written for several history magazines and appears in the new book “Americans on Politics, Policy and Pop Culture” which can be purchased on amazon.com. He is also the owner and operator of publiusforum.com. Feel free to contact him with any comments or questions : EMAIL Warner Todd Huston
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