Blunders in Obama's Camp

Like any lapse in judgement, it was a shock. But the most alarming thing is that the decision came directly from the White House.

It happened without warning in the skies of Manhattan on the agreeable sunny morning of April 27th. An enormous blue and white Boeing 747 flanked by two F-16 fighters descended to a practically hedge-grazing altitude of 1000 feet above the Hudson River and the heart of New York.

In the streets and skyscrapers of the city that saw the terrorist attacks of September 11th, 2001, thousands of New Yorkers reacted like anyone would have, panic-stricken at the idea that the sky may be crashing down around them once again.

The 747 executed a nice little waltz around the Statue of Liberty and went back where it came from, leaving behind an incredible rabble and Mayor Michael Bloomberg dumbfounded.

The mysterious aircraft was, in fact, none other than the president’s plane, code-named Air Force One when the commander-in-chief is on board. Except that, for the superfluous flyover, it was carrying no passengers.

A bright mind in the communications section of the Presidential Flight Team had simply decided that it was time to take new photos of the airplane against a backdrop that really says America, and where better than Manhattan, the epitome of gigantesque. The whole event was, as we call it in the business, a photo-op.

The thought that the military could have planned such an event above the downtown core of New York without making the smallest effort to warn the leaders and inhabitants of the city was summarized aptly by Mayor Bloomberg: it “defies the imagination,” he said, incensed.

Internal Investigation

It would appear that Barack Obama was also angry. The decision emanated from his office, though it has the reputation of having a collective intellectual quotient superior to any we’ve seen before. Obama opened an internal investigation after which the director of the White House’s military office, Louis Caldera, was dismissed from his post. He was a scapegoat, though; the inquest has revealed that there were a number of other major-leaguers involved, meeting and exchanging emails on the subject of the brilliant initiative.

One e-mail cited by the inquest gives an ample account of the weakened faculties and shortsightedness of the pseudo-communicators who contributed to the decision. The e-mail affirms that a communique was prepared for the event, but it “will only be issued if one asks for it. [The flight] will probably interest local media, but the White House should not receive requests on it.” All a communications strategy!

The investigation has also revealed that another similar photo session was planned for a few weeks later over Washington, another city targeted during the September 11th attacks. This session was cancelled after the happenings in New York.

Add to this sensational pileup of idiocy the fact that the flyover over Manhattan cost about $330,000 of American tax dollars.

Too intelligent?

The affair made all the headlines for two days and, as has been the trend up to the present, Obama does not seem to have been affected by the consequences.

You’d be dangerously mistaken in thinking that the debacle is, at the end of the day, insignificant for the future of the Obama regime. It is rather symptomatic of another issue inside the White House: they’re just too intelligent for their own good.

And Barack Obama is indeed also guilty of it. Like last Saturday at the White House Correspondents’ annual dinner, where he had the gall to crack a joke about the incident, he was met with polite chuckles; he told the crowd that his two children, Sasha and Malia, would be absent from the soiree as they were grounded for having taken Air Force One on a joyride over New York.

It wasn’t his first faux pas, however. The ridiculousness of the gifts offered to Queen Elizabeth II and the prime minister of Britain still have people talking. For the Queen, an iPod loaded with a film of her last visit to the USA, and for PM Gordon Brown, some DVDs … which don’t work on European players. In return, Brown had offered with pride a wood-carved pencil holder of the famous anti-slavery ship, the HMS Gannet.

And not to mention the verbal slips of VP Joe Biden who, in the middle of an economic crisis, recommended to Americans that they avoid enclosed spaces like airplanes in order to evade the swine flu. Or the fact that Secretary of State Hillary Clinton has qualified Pakistan as a “basket case” country.

In politics, one thing undermines the credibility of a government in the long run more than anything else: ridicule.