From an old soldier's point of view, the contrast between the two heads of state are actually glaring: Queen Elizabeth II actually has more combat military experience than George W. Bush, a fact that should prove embarrassing to the apparant chief executive if the press (or even the blogs) were to point it out--especially with the intensity of tabloid-style swiftboat campaigns.
As a young lady, Elizabeth served in World War II in the Women's Auxiliary of the Territorial Services, sort of a counterpart to the WACs in the US (jump).
Naturally, she not only survived the Nazi bombing during the London Blitz, her courage helped many others endure that suffering. Which fact largely explains her continued 80 percent approval rating with the British public. By comparison, of course, Bush's actual record is one of avoiding real combat duty during the Vietnam Conflict, while projecting a veneer of being a "war president," "commander-in-chief," and generally indulging in a pattern of embarrasing military play-acting not seen since Russia's Peter III, first husband of Catherine the Great, in 1761 imposed his worship of all things Prussian military on the proud Russian Army (Catherine The Great, by Henri Troyat, Berkeley Books, New York, 1980, p. 95 ff). Try to see any of this pointed out on TV, even though any school child above the fifth grade could look up the war records of both heads of state on Wikipedia.
Also missing from the fawning coverage is the obvious links of the families of both leaders to the Nazi regime. Bush's family ties to financiers of the Nazi regime, via Prescott Bush, during WWII are greatly downplayed by a compliasant and craven commercial media. Her husband Prince Philip had some sisters who were married to Nazis. And, on the subject of family, it remains to be seen whether any of the press remind the American public that the marriage of the Queen involved some interesting genetic mapping--as the family tree tangled a bit as Catherine and her husband Prince Philip, married 1946, were simultaneously second-cousins and third-cousins, once removed, as Wikipedia discreetly puts it. In other words, as tangled as the stereotyped jokes about Southern marriages.
Nor are the Fortune 500 advertising vehicles likely to raise the question of how the two "leaders" conducted themselves during the time of apartheid in South Africa.
The tone of fawning is easily detectable by just the title used by the "journalist" in doing the on-camera "coverage." As Kitty Kelly points out vividly in her book "The Royals," the royal family calls itself "the House of Windsor," a deliberate public relations ploy to obscure its genetic descent from German ancestry. Wikipedia also shows that the "Queen" is descended from the German "House of Wettin," of the Sax-Coburg and Gotha line, but this inconvenient fact was dumped from the Royal letterhead during the unpleasantries of trying to get draft-age British to go to war with the Germans in WWI, under blundering military and civilian leadership, and of course young men might feel less swelling of the chest if they had to salute Mr. or Mrs. Wettin, or Mr. or Mrs. Sax-Coburg and Gotha. Strictly speaking, though, these would be the correct proper names. And in journalism, at least in the old days, the first rule was to spell someone's name correctly.So we here launch the modest proposal to bloggers to at least get the royal name correct. Mrs. Wettin likely would be the first choice for priority; Mrs. Sax-Coburg and Gotha might be the most historically accurate. My favorite anecdote on calling Queen Bess by her proper name is when an elected official of the Plaid Cymros party, Leanne Wood, at a period of time when the feeling for Scottish succession from the UK was growing strong, was ejected from her legislative body for even daring to address Bess by a title other than Queen, as Ms Wood called Bess merely "Mrs. Windsor." Scottish succession is running even higher now, and it will be instructive to watch the Scottish press to see how far into the Royal German past they will reach to give proper surname coverage to WWII combat veteran Mrs. Elizabeth Wettin.
Credit: cross-posted from the News Dissector 5-9-2007