Obama to New York: Drop Dead

By: Mr. Curmudgeon
mrcurmudgeon@inthepublicsquare.com

At around 10 a.m. on Monday April 27, the sight of a low-flying 747 with F-16 fighter jets in close pursuit terrified office workers in New York's Lower Manhattan. Many thought it was a possible repeat of the 9/11 terrorist attacks in which Islamic extremists crashed two commercial airliners into the World Trade Center. “There were people in my elevator, sweating and shaking. There were women crying. It was not an experience to be taken lightly,” a financial services worker told The New York Times. At 4:39 that afternoon the White House issued an apology for causing the panic and confusion. The White House, it turns out, was conducting a photo-shoot of Air Force One with Manhattan’s diminished post-9/11 skyline as a backdrop. 

“Why the Defense Department wanted to do a photo-op right around the site of the World Trade Center catastrophe defies imagination. Poor judgment would be a nice ways to phrase it, but they did,” said a furious New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg. “Had I known about it, I would have called them right away and asked them not to. It is the federal government and they can do in the end what they please, but I would have tried to stop it. I don’t know there’s a lot else to say other than they shouldn’t have done it.”

The confusion even sent jitters down investor’s spines on Wall Street, located a short distance from Ground Zero. The Dow Jones industrials fell 40 points until word reached floor traders of the White House stunt.

Director of the White House Military Office, Louise Caldera (the Clinton administration’s Secretary of the Army), apologized and took full responsibility for the incident. The photo-shoot was part of a series of publicity shots of Air Force One’s double flying over some of the Nation’s visual wonders, including the Grand Canyon.

White House actions telegraph what in its view are the new realities: “the war on terror” is over, New York, so get over it. And the Democratic-run federal leviathan, as Mayor Bloomberg correctly observed, “can do in the end what they please.”

Terrifying Manhattanites is of little consequence compared to the importance of buttressing Obama’s self image. Photographs of the community organizer’s shiny plane commanding the skies over our nation’s God and man-made monuments underscores the president’s point: it’s not a bird, it’s not really so much the plane as it’s a supper insecure ego flying in the skies above us.

Incidentally, Air Force One’s standby was missing its presidential passenger — as Mr. Obama was delivering a speech before Washington’s National Academy of Sciences at the time.

“A half century ago, our nation made a commitment to lead the world in scientific and technological innovation…to set a goal of reaching space, and engaging every citizen in that historic mission,” Obama said, referring to the U.S. space program. New Yorkers know all too well what the president means by engaging every citizen. There is no opting out for them or their fellow Americans. Like it or not, we’re stuck with his party’s foolish barnstorming governance with its sky-high costs. As President Obama made abundantly clear over Manhattan's skyscrapers: the sky is no limit for his or the Democratic Party’s omnipresent hubris.

—Mr. Curmudgeons