Oh, dear, oh, dear. It seems that our mom-jeans wearing President Pansy has gone scuttling away on a "vacation" while Russia does...something...really, who knows at this point...with the Crimean region of the Ukraine. Seems that after he and his wife, First Lady Nutrition Queen, did some speaking in Florida, they planned to spend the weekend in Key Largo, golfing, relaxing, doing shit that people do.
This upset the loyal Defenders of Freedom on the right. "Startling," they said, that the president would dare to go on a weekend away when evil but oh-so-manly Vladimir Putin is crushing the Ukrainian Ukrainians between his saggy pecs of doom. In The Washington Post, pasty, bloated torture apologist Marc Thiessen columnized, "While more Russian forces were pouring into Crimea this past weekend, and Russian legislators announced their readiness to annex the Ukrainian province, where was our commander in chief? Monitoring events in the Situation Room? Meeting with the Joint Chiefs at the Pentagon? Holding an emergency meeting of NATO leaders? Nope. He was enjoying the Florida sunshine with his family at an oceanfront resort in Key Largo."
Thiessen worked for George W. Bush, who really was once the President of the United States. That wasn't a bad dream or an acid flashback. That would be the same George W. Bush who is in this picture:
Now, the Rude Pundit's no architecture expert. He could probably tell your Frank Lloyd Wright from your Frank Gehry, but so could almost anyone with five seconds and a smartphone. However, he's pretty sure that's not the White House behind Bush and sister-wife Condoleezza Rice. The first clue is that it's not, you know, white.
Turns out that it's the Bush ranch in Crawford, Texas. You remember that place. The one that seemed to have endless piles of brush that needed clearing, like a brush hyrdra that kept multiplying. Yeah, Bush is speaking from the ranch on August 16, 2008 because Texas is awesome in August. He was talking about his former man-crush, Vladimir Putin, and the Russian invasion of Georgia, the country, not the state, although both have lots of brush.
Now, the point here is not "Oh, hey, look, all presidents take vacations." There's always gonna be some fuckin' crisis or other. It's not "Oh, hey, these days a president can do a lot of presidentin' from other places." (Obama was on the phone with world leaders relentlessly from Key Largo.)
It's this: President Obama is back in Washington, DC, today. Bush stayed at that brush-bedeviled wasteland of a vacation home until nearly the end of August, most of the time that Russia was at war with Georgia. A search of Nexis shows not a single news report in 2008 that criticized Bush for his vacation during the crisis. Fuck, you can hardly find anything that calls Bush's Crawford sweatfest a "vacation" because by that time, it described a large percentage of his presidency.
This time, with Obama, not so much. Double standard? Delusion? Or just more of the outrage of diminishing returns we're all subject to, like the jackals of the right-wing anger machine are heroin addicts who need more and more of that sweet, warm shit in the veins in order to feel anything?
