Ok, Britain’s Queen Elizabeth II,   despite the multitude of titles and crowns which perch on her 83 year old head, is technically not the Queen Mum although she is the queen and she is a mum.   

She won’t be granted that overly-familiar, unofficial Queen Mum title until she steps down and Prince Charles gets the nod and the crown.  That’s not likely to occur soon mainly because she doesn’t seem like to like Bonnie Prince Charlie  very much, with good reason, but she does like all those trappings of queenship.  

If she ever does decide to abdicate, retire, be put out to pasture, and Prince Harry ascends to the throne, will that make Liz the Queen Grand Mum?  Then again, Harry is the offspring of Lady Diana and the queen really didn’t like her!

More to the point, does anyone care about all this crap?

Well, not much on this side of the Pond but in merry old England many, not all, care about the queen mumship and all the other folderol surrounding the anachronistic House of Windsor. 

Now Liz has gone on record to demonstrate that she cares about the shenanigans going on involving everything from M.P. toilet seats to country homes being charged to the Chancellor of the Exchequer, i.e. the British purse.

Don’t you just love those titles?

An earlier British monarch was said to have expressed her upsetment with the line, “We are not pleased,” using that royal “we” as American politicians do to deflect from the egoistical “I” when they actually mean “I.” 

Anyway, good Queen Liz is not pleased with the ongoing scandal in Parliament or as she put it to her inept Prime Minister Gordon Brown,   she is “deeply troubled:” http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1183468/The-Queen-tells-Gordon-Brown-deeply-troubled-MPs-expenses.html.

Crude Americans would just say they were pissed. 

Brown responded that he is “appalled and angered” over the profligacy of some fellow parliamentarians, expressing an indignation comparable to Nancy Pelosi’s over waterboarding when she knew about it for years.   

Gordo undoubtedly knew what was going on as well since billing the government had for years been the ruse Brit pols employed to convince the rabble they were not greedily seeking pay hikes and instead merely asked that they be compensated for necessary expenditures.  Like toilet seats and country homes.

As Reuters reported, “Britain’s 646 legislators receive an annual salary of almost 65,000 pounds and claimed 93 million pounds in expenses last year, an average of 144,000 pounds each:” http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20090516/wl_nm/us_britain_politics_expenses.  For the math-challenged, that’s 210,000 pounds or around $300,000 a year–for blustering.

British commoners are suffering though the same recesssion/depression/fiscal chaos/bank failures/financial upheavals as we are but nothing seems to bother the elites since they are above it all.  That sort of rings a bell with regard to America’s overpaid blusterers in Congress, no?

Blimey!  Charlie Rangel   couldn’t cheat any better! . . .

(Read the rest at http://genelalor.com)

For America’s First Lady to reciprocally extend her arm around Liz after Liz had done the same may be a breach of British Royal Protocol, but who really cares, except the Brits? 

The British Empire is long gone and the Brits should get off their high horses and dispatch them forthwith to the knackers.  Within a few generations, or less, Great Britain may be a Muslim island nation on the western border of Eurabia and the Queen’s successors may be practicing Sharia Law and an ayatollah may be sitting on her throne.

British royalty has for centuries been so puffed up with a sense of its own grandiosity that it has as little comprehension for planetary realities as it has empathy for the commoners of England, the masses who mindlessly continue to fund their opulent lifestyle for the sole purpose of preserving an antiquated tradition.

Even fellow royals such as the late Princess Diana    are ostracized when they thumb their royal noses at that tradition.  Yet, Diana’s cheating hubby, 61 year old “Prince” Charles–next in line to Mum’s throne, he thinks– is given a pass for his multitudinous peccadillos. 

Bonnie Prince Charlie is the same prince who was, allegedly, long-involved with the equinous, former Camilla Parker-Bowles and who ever-so-romantically expressed his wish to be her human tampon.   That would never have worked; Chuckie is so ultra-fastidious that he has his man servant hold the cup when he must provide a urine sample.

However, I digress.  Back to the Gaffe Tour.

Touching a royal, and gifting ipods stuffed with Obama speeches aside, there are gaffes and there are gaffes, lesser screw-ups vs. major screw-ups, big boners and little boners.

Like Michelle giving Liz a back squeeze, Barack’s bowing to a Saudi king may be attributable to sheer naivete’.  However, when the president of the United States bowed and seemed headed down to kiss the sandals of King Abduallah bin Abdul Aziz Al Saud, he displayed not merely lack of proper etiquette and protocol but an abject ignorance as to what the gesture meant and implied, namely subjugation to another head of state. 

See here for an upcloseandpersonal view of an American president checking to see if King Abd wears a belt: http://www.jihadwatch.org/archives/025498.php

That move is not faintly comparable to George W. Bush’s America-friendly wink at Queen Elizabeth a few years back–for which he was ridiculed and castigated by our mainstream media.  Obama could have given a polite head bow, which would have been bad enough, or extended his right hand to shake that of the king in a gesture of genuine friendship.  However, what he did was an overt act of obsequiousness by an American president to a foreign potentate and an insult to his country.

Perhaps because of wife Michelle’s heritage, (she is the grandchild of slaves whereas he has been called by his peers, “not black enough”), Obama may have felt it proper . . .

(Read the rest at http://genelalor.com/)