Is 'dis' respect?

‘Johnny, what are you doing with your smartphone out while we’re having this most serious discussion?’

Johnny: ‘I’m bored.  I need a break.  So I’m playing poker.’

Another on the opposite side of the aisle, the class president in fact, had his foot up on his desk and was called on it as being hardly appropriate posture; he was in a leadership position after all and therefore had the responsibility to set a good example; and furthermore he was reminded that this room was not his bedroom.

Who are these slackers, these scoundrels, these scofflaws?

John McCain and President Barak Obama respectively – and disrespectfully.

“Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.), who was photographed by The Washington Post playing poker on his smartphone during Tuesday’s Syria hearing, explained to CNN that he just needed a break from a lengthy hearing,” reports Aaron Blake this Sept.4.

That’s ‘Syria’ as in serious. 

While Johnny played poker, “one of the most pivotal congressional hearings of the year” was being held reported Newsmax, in which “top administration officials testified and senators debated” – other than McCain of course who was otherwise occupied – “whether to sign on to President Barack Obama's plan to bomb Syria for chemical weapons use.”

Evidently McCain gets bored quite often.

Just Goggling McCain and gambling and the two appear all but synonymous.

Various headlines read, “McCain's Tax Returns Hide Gambling;” and “Aides Had To Pull McCain Away From Vegas Casino On Campaign Stop.”  The campaign referenced of course was when McCain was a contender for President.

Speaking of President, that would be the guy with his foot on the desk, President Barak Obama. 

Sure, Obama isn’t the only president to have plopped his size 12’s on someone else’s polished antique furniture - in this case the Resolute Desk in the Oval Office.

But for many it doesn’t sit well that the President has a leg up while on the phone perhaps at that very moment, as the caption to the photo suggests, discussing “Congressional authorization for the U.S. to take military action following the alleged Sarin nerve gas used in an attack on Syrian civilians.”

Are the recent McCain-Obama gaffes evidence of having trivialized their office? Would the two get away with this in school?  Or, in the big scheme of things – being on the brink of war, for example – isn’t a little bit of poker or a foot-up- casual-photo-shoot trivial?

Trivial?

Abigail Adams - wife of John Adams, the first Vice President, and second President, of the United States, and the mother of John Quincy Adams, the sixth President of the United States – warned “if we are surrounded by the trivial and the vicious, it is all too easy to make our peace with it.”  (William J. Bennett, “Our Sacred Honor,” p.18)