No Win Situation In Paris

It's funny that the same media that constantly attacks the President for playing golf and "taking vacations at taxpayer expense" is now laying into the White House for not going to Sunday's Paris rally.

Don’t look for the president or vice president among the photos of 44 heads of state who locked arms and marched down Boulevard Voltaire in Paris. Nor did they join a companion march the French Embassy organized in Washington on Sunday afternoon.

Indeed, Obama’s public reactions to the attacks in Paris last week have been muted. His initial response Wednesday to the killing of 12 people at the Charlie Hebdo newspaper offices was delivered as he sat calmly in an armchair in the Oval Office speaking about the “cowardly” acts and defending freedom of the press. Two days later, as a gunman took hostages and went on to kill four people in a kosher grocery, Obama took a few seconds away from a community college proposal rollout in Tennessee because he said with events unfolding, “I wanted to make sure to comment on them” — but neither then nor afterward specifically condemned that attack.

Obama wasn’t far from the march in D.C. on Sunday that wended silently along six blocks from the Newseum to the National Law Enforcement Officers Memorial. Instead, he spent the chilly afternoon a few blocks away at the White House, with no public schedule, no outings.

Joe Biden was back home in Wilmington, Delaware. Neither they nor any high-level administration official attended either event.

France’s top diplomat in the U.S. tried, diplomatically, to make the best of it.

“Thank you to Victoria Nuland, assistant secretary at the Department of State, who has represented the U.S. Authorities at the demonstration in DC. A friend,” Ambassador Gérard Araud tweeted Sunday evening, as criticism of the administration mounted.

And though it’s symbolism — Obama made several statements last week condemning the terror, and the government has been supporting French efforts throughout — the symbolism has caught a lot of attention.

It's a convenient fiction.  If President Obama had gone to Paris, there's no doubt in my mind this very same Politico article would also be filled with criticism -- this time about how the President's Secret Service presence was disruptive to ordinary Parisians and how the cost was being borne by hard-working American taxpayers while the President was on "yet another vacation jaunt".

Of course, it didn't stop the White House from admitting they should have sent someone to Paris.

Nope, it's just another ridiculous example of our "liberal media" in action.