Glenn Beck: Obama gift gaffe

"GLENN: We mentioned it last week. Nobody in America is upset about this. You remember last week we told you that Barack Obama, when Gordon Brown came into town, he decided that he wasn't going to have a press conference. He also decided that there wouldn't be any British flags in the press conference, when they met, there wouldn't be a British flag. What are you even thinking? So there's no British flags. They met in the oval office. This set, the diplomatic core for the English back, the press corps and they didn't know what to do. They didn't know how to spend this. What does that mean? And Barack Obama just said, I'm not going to have a joint press conference. Well, you don't do that. I mean, I've seen him with the president-elect Iceland. Hello, it's Great Britain, our greatest ally. But then he also gave a gift. He gave a gift of a bunch of videos. Well, okay. That's usually not what the president gives. Usually it is a gift to the head of state of something of significance, something of real importance, something that signifies how deep our friendship goes and also says something about our country and our resources and, you know, our heritage. To me it's appropriate that Barack Obama, when he looks to what could be a statement gift that I can give the leader of our greatest ally, what is something that says everything you need to know about America, he goes and gets a bunch of DVDs from movies that we've made. I mean, it's -- and he didn't even get the movies that they can watch over in England. It's not the same technology. So all of the movies that Gordon Brown was given as a gift from our president he can't even watch. And what did we receive as a gift? Barack Obama was given a pen made from the wood of the HMS Resolute. The Resolute was one of their big warships and it went -- these two ships went up and they were going up into I think it was the Arctic Circle, I'm not sure. They went up to the Arctic Circle. The Resolute gets stuck in the ice. So does the other one, but the Resolute never gets out, and the captain of the Resolute says, "Get out of the ship, get onto the other one; we're going home." When he gets home, he's court-martialed because he's left the HMS Resolute, a perfectly good ship, and he abandoned. And so he is court-martialed for it. Well, eventually the ice breaks and America goes up and we pull that thing out of the ice and we sail it over to England and we return her in, like, 1850 something or other as a gift. Well, the Resolute is in service for England and, you know, it signifies our gift to England and we say, please forgive us for everything that we've gone through in the past 50, 75 years. We are brothers. The Resolute is a big deal. So when the Resolute is decommissioned, Queen Elizabeth decides, I'm going to take the wood and I'm going to make two desks. I'm going to make one for me and one for the president. This is as significant as France giving us the Statue of Liberty. So she takes this and she makes it into two desks. It's the desk that -- remember little JFK, Jr., he opens up the trap door and he looks, you know, through it? That's the USS Resolute desk. There's only two of them: One with the queen, one with us. FDR put that door there. This is such a historic desk. He put that door there so it would hide his wheelchair so nobody could see his wheelchair. The door is the only place where the seal has the eagle looking down at the arrows instead of the olive branches, okay?

"So what does Gordon Brown do? He comes to meet with the president and he gives him a set of pens made from the wood of the USS Resolute to match the desk that should be in a museum. He gives him a matching set of pens. Barack Obama hands him a basket -- I'm not kidding you, hands him a basket of DVDs that he can't play. Mrs. Brown has children's clothing from, like, the best designer in England, you know, all fit the kids. Michelle Obama goes downstairs, grabs a couple of boxes of Marine One helicopter models and gives them to Mrs. Brown: 'Here, this is for you.' As bad as this is -- because what this shows is either the disdain of the Obamas for England, and I don't know which one's worse, the disdain of England from the Obamas, and you should see -- Michelle Obama, what she has written about England, you know, they were just, they were the linchpin of the slave trade. She has real disdain for them, at least she did when she wrote her term paper. It may be just that, that she hates white England. I'm not sure. But let's give her the benefit of the doubt and let's say they don't hate England. It shows the arrogance. We have people in the State Department, this is all they do is come up with gifts. The arrogance of this administration. They are obviously not listening to the State Department on something this important as a gift. And the worst part of it is the bust of Winston Churchill, there are two of these. England's working in twos: The HMS Resolute desk and the bust of Winston Churchill. This is the most famous bust of Winston Churchill. England gave this bust to the president for the White House right after 9/11 as a sign of standing together: We will stand together united as one. They gave us this historic bust of Churchill. It has been sitting in the oval office since 9/11. Barack Obama says we're going to box this back up and you guys can take it home with you. Gordon Brown says, 'No, no, no. Mr. President, that was a gift from the people of England after 9/11. If you want to keep that in one of your museums, you may keep it in one of your museums but please, no, no, that was a gift. That wasn't to borrow. We didn't just lend that out to you. That's a gift from us.' He said, 'No, that's okay. We don't want it.' And he's sending the bust of Winston Churchill back to England. The people of England are going crazy and they're going crazy because our press hasn't even reported on this. What is this guy doing? What is he doing?"