President Obama assured the latest recipient of the prestigious Medal of Honor during a reception Thursday at the White House: “I am not the lead singer from Korn.”
Mr. Obama referred to the 1990s metal band in his speech before awarding Army Capt. Florent Groberg, 32, with the country’s highest military distinction.
The president’s remark wasn’t the result of a sneaky speechwriter or a teleprompter on the fritz, but rather a reference to a meeting Capt. Groberg had with the band’s actual singer, Jonathan Davis, while recovering in the hospital from wartime injuries.
Capt. Groberg was serving in Afghanistan in August 2012 when he spotted a suicide bomber and tackled him, saving the lives of several other soldiers but not without sustaining injuries that required him to undergo 33 surgeries on his leg alone.
The Korn singer visited the vet while he was recuperating, but the ailing soldier assumed he was imagining their encounter.
“Flo thought, ’What’s going on? Am I hallucinating?’” Mr. Obama recalled during Thursday’s ceremony, “Today Flo, I want to assure you you are not hallucinating. You are actually in the White House. Those cameras are on, and I am not the lead singer from Korn.”
As Rolling Stone was quick to point out, Mr. Davis has shared some choice words about the commander-in-chief in the past, telling an interviewer in 2014 that Mr. Obama was “an Illuminati puppet” who had “dragged the country down to the worst it’s ever been.”
Responding to the president’s decision to share the bedside anecdote this week, the singer of Korn, whose hits included “Freak on a Leash” and “Got the Life,” shared an excerpt from the speech on Instagram, which he bluntly captioned: “Wow.”
• Andrew Blake can be reached at ablake@washingtontimes.com.
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