Sweet Baby James vs. The Terrorist

Well, John Kerry has done something I did not think was possible. He made me cringe while listening to James Taylor. Thanks Obama.

I have always loved Sweet Baby James. I remember being all of eight years old and listening to Fire and Rain on my big sister's little 45 RPM record player. Then thinking of my first steady girlfriend, Dina, while listening to How Sweet it Is. We were all of 12 and I would talk to her on the phone at night until I fell asleep and would  hear "BUTCH!" screamed from the other end. But I digress.

It occurs to me that the only way we could have handled this worse would be sending French President Francois Hollande (the name that is almost a delicious sauce) an FTD© Get Well arrangement with the cute little bear hugging the vase and a Mylar balloon proclaiming "Je Suis Charlie."

Kerry was ham fisted, hugging Hollande like one would a widow at a funeral and giving him a kiss on the cheek. The man goes through a terrorist attack and being kissed by John Kerry  in such a short span of time.

 The Franco-American relationship gets closer

Taylor, for his part seemed kind of embarrassed and wanting to climb inside his guitar.  Some genius set up a mic for the guitar, but not for Taylor who spent the first several bars hunched over like an anorexic Quasimodo, trying to sing into a microphone essentially level with his crotch. We call that the Carly Simon position. Finally some assistant or whoever leaned over with a mic and it soon became the weird specter of James Taylor doing himself on karaoke night. 

The London Daily Mail called it "toe curling diplomacy." I call it Jimmy Carter laughing as his ex-president stock rises.