WHY IS THIS MAN BOWING?

What is it with the bowing? Why cannot this man stop bowing? First it was the king of Saudi Arabia and then the emporer of Japan. At least those guys are royalty, and the White House could claim that protocol demanded the obeisance. But this picture was taken in China, which, being a communist one-party state, has no royalty. The man to whom our president is bowing is the premier, Wen Jiabao. He is not even the head of state; that would be Hu Jintao. Wen is head of government, like the prime minister in Britain. Surely protocol cannot demand that the president, who is both head of state and head of government, should bow to a head of government. Or does Mr. Obama plan to bow to Gordon Brown next time he sees him?

It seems that to get the president to bow to you, you should either occupy the throne of a country we defeated sixty years ago, sell us lots of oil, or hold billions of dollars in U.S. debt. The pope, I suppose, would get a fist bump.