Arizona Governor Puts Her Finger in Obama’s Face, What’s With The Disrespect?

Jan Brewer is the governor of Arizona and a proponent of heavy immigration restrictions. President Obama is not in favor of such restrictions and he is also…president. Brewer recently published a book, Scorpions for Breakfast, that includes a depiction of a meeting between the two on the topic. She describes their conversation with the words:

“I felt a little bit like I was being lectured to, and I was a little kid in a classroom, if you will, and he was this wise professor and I was this little kid, and this little kid knows what the problem is and I felt minimized to say the least.”

Apparently Barack Obama did not like that or find it accurate, so when he landed in Phoenix on Wednesday and was greeted by Brewer outside of his aircraft, he let her know. “He was a little disturbed about my book,” Brewer explained. What ensued was a tight-faced conversation had through strained smiles that for some mysterious reason just had to take place in front of dozens of reporters, a crowd of yammering spectators, and the humming noise of an airplane. The photograph below is a result of that conversation. 

Now, I’ll just come on out and say this … Jan Brewer is a dodo bird and does not like brown people. I’ve had my eye on her for quite some time and she is the driving force behind the Arizona law that basically makes existing while brown a crime in that state. That said, if I were her I’d feel like a little kid in a classroom around Barack Obama too. He has a law degree from Harvard and she never earned a bachelor’s (but did earn a radiological technologist certificate from Glendale Community College). Also, he is the president of the United States. So fair is fair and I’m not even mad at what she said in her book, even though the fact that she said it probably means that she is mad about life in general.

But what point have we come to when anyone thinks it’s acceptable to put a finger in The President’s face like that? I’m pretty sure that if one of us went to work and decided to talk to even a colleague with any “talk to the hand action,” that incident would end up in our annual review, so what makes you get that out of pocket with the Commander in Chief? What I’m trying to figure out is whether the disrespect shown to Barack Obama by his detractors is something that the media is trumping up but not commenting on very much, or an insidious attitude of disrespect (be it political or racial or a little bit of both) that warrants formal address.

What do you think?