Tuesday, December 01, 2009
Gate crashers
Salahi denies being White House party-crasher
Of course Mr. & Mrs. Salahi were uninvited, & of course they're every bit the a-holes we think they are, & it's too late to do anything about them, because they accomplished their goal of becoming trash celebrities. At least some heads will roll in the Secret Service & on the White House social event staff. No president since Lincoln has been so at-risk from the implacable rage unleashed by his legitimate election to office, a rage directed at Barack Obama personally.
When Lincoln was president, anyone could walk into the White House & wander around. Washington was filled with spies & loud-mouth seditious Southern sympathizers - many of them entrenched in congress & the Federal bureaucracy, or writing for extremely partisan newspapers. Remind you of anyone? Others were even more dangerous, & Lincoln's close friends lost sleep worrying about his safety. Besides weekly meet & greet receptions featuring Mrs. Lincoln when she wasn't grieving, sick, or depressed, the President had regular open office hours & any citizen could get in line & have a chance to meet with him privately & waste his time. Some wanted his autograph or to counsel him on how to win the war (He knew how to win the war, he just couldn't make his generals do it). Others expected an appointment as part-time under-assistant postmaster of an obscure village. It was what he had to look forward to after his breakfast of one soft-boiled egg, a piece of toast, & coffee. The White House coffee, I imagine, was wretched in those days. Lincoln rarely treated his visitors rudely or abruptly, but he was expert at telling a little joke while steering supplicants out of his office before they realized they had been dismissed without getting anything. But then the next one entered.
"If a nation expects to be ignorant and free, in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and never will be." Thomas Jefferson
Of course Mr. & Mrs. Salahi were uninvited, & of course they're every bit the a-holes we think they are, & it's too late to do anything about them, because they accomplished their goal of becoming trash celebrities. At least some heads will roll in the Secret Service & on the White House social event staff. No president since Lincoln has been so at-risk from the implacable rage unleashed by his legitimate election to office, a rage directed at Barack Obama personally.
When Lincoln was president, anyone could walk into the White House & wander around. Washington was filled with spies & loud-mouth seditious Southern sympathizers - many of them entrenched in congress & the Federal bureaucracy, or writing for extremely partisan newspapers. Remind you of anyone? Others were even more dangerous, & Lincoln's close friends lost sleep worrying about his safety. Besides weekly meet & greet receptions featuring Mrs. Lincoln when she wasn't grieving, sick, or depressed, the President had regular open office hours & any citizen could get in line & have a chance to meet with him privately & waste his time. Some wanted his autograph or to counsel him on how to win the war (He knew how to win the war, he just couldn't make his generals do it). Others expected an appointment as part-time under-assistant postmaster of an obscure village. It was what he had to look forward to after his breakfast of one soft-boiled egg, a piece of toast, & coffee. The White House coffee, I imagine, was wretched in those days. Lincoln rarely treated his visitors rudely or abruptly, but he was expert at telling a little joke while steering supplicants out of his office before they realized they had been dismissed without getting anything. But then the next one entered.
Labels: Barack Hussein Obama, count the yoyos, culture, media madness
