Obama's Secret Remarks About Netanyahu

„So French President Nicolas Sarkozy, not knowing his microphone is hot, expresses his contempt for Bibi Netanyahu, calls him a liar, and President Barack Obama commiserates, lamenting the fact that he has to deal with Netanyahu even more than the French.

Ho hum. As Ecclesiastes would say, is there anything new under the sun?

Surely, there is nothing particularly surprising about a French leader condemning an Israeli leader. It's a law of nature, like gravity or the orbit of the earth around the sun. Indeed, Sarkozy is a lot better than his predecessor, Jacques Chirac, who practiced undisguised contempt toward Israel. When it comes to France and Israel, diminished expectations are in order.

And Obama? Well, for the first two years of his presidency he acted with condescension toward the democratically elected leader of the Israeli people. This year, however, after experiencing his self-confessed 'shellacking' during the mid-term elections, part of which was due to his perceived unfriendliness to the Jewish state, he decided to make nice with Bibi and treat him with the same respect he accords other world leaders, albeit without the warmth of the two-armed embrace he reserved for Hugo Chavez or the bow he accorded the King of Saudi Arabia.”