Damned if He Does, Damned if He Doesn't

Poor President Obama can't win with our conservative lunatic fringe. After being raked over the coals for cautiously withholding from speaking publicly for 72 hours about the crotch bomber, now Obama is being raked over the coals yet again for speaking too soon about the devastating earthquake in Haiti.

Is there anything our President can do that would appease the right wing, who can somehow find the strength to bear up under the stress and strain of at least 100,000 dead to lambaste Obama in the interests of a partisan primacy that no longer exists? Obviously not.

How soon have they forgotten George W. Bush's own limp-dicked response to the tsunami that killed over 100,000 in Indonesia in December 2004. Remember that? If you're Republican, I seriously doubt it but we in the reality-based community do. Bush pledged a piddling $15 million, then $35 million then later backtracked when the UN called him "stingy". Three days later, he was shamed into pledging ten times that much.

The $15 million Bush had originally pledged (while, as was common with him, he was on vacation) was a little over a third what his nine, corporately-funded inaugural balls that followed later that month would cost. How the Bush administration treated the yellow man was, in retrospect, an eerie precursor to how it would treat the black man on the Gulf coast later that year. Yet all we got for our criticism of the "president" was insults from the same lunatic fringe that's even now criticizing a real, legally elected president for jumping in too early to help another devastated part of the world.

Perhaps it's just because there's millions of black people involved here. Perhaps, as the Rude Pundit opined, if this had happened in Sweden, it wouldn't be so much of an issue and maybe our major news networks would've covered the earthquake a little more diligently instead of acting as if it never happened.

So listening to right wing organ donors like Rush Limbaugh put me in mind of another story, one that the MSM did pick up on, namely the balloon boy. Like the balloon, Limbaugh's full of air, aimless and embarrassingly conspicuous and there's no sign of life or intelligence inside.