This has really gotten under my skin. Every time I look at that photograph I wince. I've tried to convince myself that a camera can capture a lot of untruth in 1/60th second. Maybe it did there too but I have not been successful in convincing myself. Pointing your finger at somebody especially at close range is not susceptible to many interpretations except one.  It's the body language of both men. Obama the lecturer, lecturing, looking directly at his subject, mouth open, clearly speaking, pointing--it's aggressive. Harper, head down, not making eye contact, hands at side, slumped. If that camera lied in that 1/60th second it lied a lot. In the context of that Washington Post article however, that camera did not lie about the other 59/60th of the U.S.-Canada relationship. At the least, that camera is telling symbolic truth.

I have been taken aback continuously by the personal hostility in politics the last few years: Putin's body language in meetings with Obama, his flat statement that he has no personal relationship with Obama; Netanyahu's speech to Congress; Samantha Power's berating Vitaly Churkin at the U.N.; domestically, the Tea Party, Boehner, McConnell, the government shutdown, last weekend John McCain telling Obama to get over his "temper tantrum" with Netanyahu. You can probably think of more than I can. There is no doubt that politics internationally and domestically is just more personally hostile in the Obama years--more hostile than it was even under George W. Bush. Bush had Tony Blair. Bush had Putin, for godssake, Bush had warm personal relationships with those guys, maybe with others I've forgotten. Reagan had Thatcher, Reagan had Gorbachev, JFK had Marilyn Monroe. Domestic politics was really rough in Bush's second term but not as rough, it doesn't seem to me, as under Obama.

In every case I did not see what Obama had done to deserve the coldness and hostility. In each of the instances above involving Obama personally, I blamed the other guy, I still blame the other guys, maybe I'd blame Harper if I knew anything about the Keystone pipeline, but there has been this discordant background noise that has grown louder, Obama's "aloofness," "cool, detached," smug, nouveau riche, the lone walks, the lone golfing, the Big Picture of NO warm personal relationships with ANY world leader. And now: U.S.-Canada relations "as cool AS I EVER REMEMBER," according to a diplomat who goes back to the 1980's! CANADA.

Good grief.

Look: warm personal relationships...I don't do warm personal relationships. In politics, especially in geopolitics...What geopolitical good came of the Putin-Bush love bites? Huh? Of Jimmy Carter's bussing of Leonid Brezhnev? You don't need love bites but you can't have sucker punches. You can't be fighting with everybody. Even I don't fight with everybody. "Dancing" whether lovin' or fightin' takes two. Obama is guilty under the Dancing Principle which I just made up and which Holds that if every time a person dances his "partner" ends up with her toes bruised then he ain't lovin' dancin'.

Discarding the analogy now, you can't have your ambassador berating the Russian ambassador, you can't have her predecessor,  Susan Rice, storming away from the Russian and Chinese ambassadors, you can't have Victoria Nuland saying "Fuck the E.U.," into a bugged telephone, and you certainly can't have finger-pointing at the prime minister of Canada. Good grief.