I have to say, that Barry continues to be the shit. "Ball's still in your court, Dubya, feel free to not fuck it up any more and then try to blame it on me."

I'm not totally that's what's doing, but I do get the sense that he's delegating i.e. "This isn't that important, so you take care of it, while I deal with the important stuff."

It could also be a case of not wanting to in the middle of things since Bush is still in office and originally called for this meeting.

This is a meeting between standing heads of state, so yeah, it seems inappropriate for Obama to attend himself. I interpreted the way that he's sending representatives for informal meetings to be pretty assertive in a background kind of way.