"You're no James Bond," a dissolute Tom Hanks tells a portly and bewhiskered Philip Seymour Hoffman in Charlie Wilson's War. "And you're no Thomas Jefferson, either. Let's call it even."
We could use more of both, one feels, now that our chief executive, said to be cooler than 007 by the actor currently incarnating him on screen, has been caught bowing before the Wahhabist sovereign of Saudi Arabia, keeping absolutely silent about the high seas kidnapping of an American by Somali pirates, but giving ample photo time to the Washington Post for a story on his family's new dog, Bo. (The three-page online version concludes informatively: "Staff writers Howard Kurtz and Rob Pegoraro contributed to this report.")
The adorably floppy and piebald Bo is a Portuguese Water Dog, which may mean he's the most equipt in the Obama administration to go save Capt. Richard Phillips, now floating in a covered lifeboat in the middle of the Indian Ocean after valiantly offering himself as hostage to the pirates who raided the Maersk Alabama (his sacrifice allowed the crew to repel the pirates from the ship). Richards is surrounded in his adrift prison by four armed men, who previously wanted $2 million, but will now apparently settle for an easy getaway. One would think that this imperiled citizen's heroism would be enough to get some word of encouragement from the leader of the free world. Instead:
The president himself has yet to speak publicly about the incident near the Horn of Africa. He brushed off a reporter’s question Thursday. Instead he has let his top surrogates do the talking, although their comments have been brief, perhaps mindful that their words could influence the sensitive negotiations with the hostage-taking pirates.
Also, negotiations between the U.S. and the pirates have broken down.
In other news, Bo likes his tummy scratched, except around the stitched area where he was just neutered (can someone get Kurtz a fact-check on the Portguese word for "ouch"?).
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