Brown came to Washington and was greeted by both a White House and a State Department that were embarrassingly unprepared for his arrival. There were no official events that are customary for a visit from a foreign dignitary such as no state dinner and no joint press conference.

But the traditional gift exchange was the ultimate gaff. Gordon Brown presented President Obama with a signed first edition of Sir Martin Gilbert’s definitive seven-volume biography of Winston Churchill, only for Brown to discover that the bust of Churchill given by Tony Blair to George W. Bush had been returned to the British embassy by Obama’s staff!

Brown then presented Obama with a penholder made from the timber of a warship that combated the slave trade. In return for such a valuable gift Obama then gave Brown a stack of Hollywood DVDs. Unfortunately Brown is blind in one eye and therefore doesn’t watch many movies, and unless Obama knew to buy them in the PAL format (and not the NTSC format used by American DVD players), the DVDs are NOT even compatible with British disc players anyway.

The lame excuse the White House gave was that Obama is “overwhelmed” with handling the financial crisis and is “exhausted” and “out of sorts”. So the message we should be getting from the response/excuse is this: It’s not that our current president is callous and uncaring (if not down right ignorant), he’s just in way over his head.

To make matters worse one ignorant State Department official, when questioned by the London Telegraph, compounded the embarrassment by stating the following about the special relationship between America and Great Britain. “There’s nothing special about Britain. You’re just the same as the other 190 countries in the world. You shouldn’t expect special treatment.”

Do you believe that? Great Britain is “nothing special”? One of our staunchest allies, if not THE most staunch ally “shouldn’t expect special treatment”? But we can give $900 billion to Hamas, and therefore by extension terrorists, and there’s nothing wrong with that!

If this is an example of how our foreign policy is going to be handled over the next roughly four years, then we have some very serious problems coming our way.