Obama Tanks Toast to Queen of England; Painful, Awkward, Embarrassing

My Toast will go on

President Obama, bless his heart, tries to do the right thing, but makes an awful mess of it.  He inadvertently cued the band when he began his toast “To Her Majesty, the Queen”, and then paused, and it all went downhill from there.

Some feel (see comments on the video) that the Queen “snubbed” the President, when in fact, what she did was contain the damage.   She’s not isolating him; he’s doing that all by himself.

That’s the Queen’s house–you study up before you go there. Besides which, if she had suddenly begun improvising responses to the President’s mis-steps, that would have propagated the error until nobody knew what to do. These things are scripted, and a guest worth his salt attends rehearsal if he doesn’t know it cold.

There’s a point to be made about flexibility and extending grace, but it would only have sullied the whole thing. Let the guy with the mistake wear it.

Notice that he doesn’t even drink to the toast he proposed: I think the only message there is that he had become hopelessly confused by that time. My guess is that he did not know why the Queen would not drink a toast to herself: One never drinks a toast to oneself. In the military, we know that. In college, they don’t. I think he tried to do the right thing by not drinking after she did not drink, but–wrong again.