The latest Republican who has gone against decorum of not criticizing a sitting President on foreign soil is Senator James Inhofe (R-Oklahoma). He plans to send representatives to Copenhagen to tell delegates not to work with Obama on climate change.
Senator Inhofe is making a break with Republican admonitions during the previous George Bush administration when they maintained it was treasonous to criticize an administration on foreign soil. In this case Inhofe maintains his mission to send his own special delegation to the upcoming conference in Copenhagen to underline how important it is not to cooperate with Obama on climate change initiatives. He calls this a truth squad according to the report on the
TM Muckracker website which relates information given by Inhofe to National Review.
This follows Sarah Palin’s trip to China where she freely criticized the Obama administration in Hong Kong according to the
Wall Street Journal. She took the spotlight to say, “Our strong defense posture in Asia has helped keep the region safe and allowed ... this area to prosper. Our Asian allies get nervous if they think we're weakening with security commitments."
In August former Arkansas Mike Huckabee traveled to Israel with Jewish leader to denounce American foreign policy in relationship to Israel. On the issue of settlements, an issue President Barack Obama has criticized as standing in the way of peaceful resolutions with Arab countries, Huckabee said, according to
Salon.com, that“ the US should not "be telling Jewish people in Israel where they should and should not live."
As evidence of a Republican turnaround on the matter of criticizing the government on foreign soil,
The New York Times in 2006 reported how when Al Gore went to Saudi Arabia and criticized what he called abuses committed by the U.S. government against Arabs after 9/11, he was said by Republican critics, government leaders, and conservative bloggers to have shown “extreme disloyalty to his country,” as noted in Investors Daily at the time.
Given what Senator Inhofe intends to do it would be interesting to learn whether or not any sitting Democrats in the Congress during the Bush administration ever sent a representative group in opposition to the administrative policies of Bush – Cheney and the American government at the time
