I was kind of thinking that my contempt for Barack Obama had hit its limit, but he proved me wrong this morning with this:
President Obama said his administration was looking at ways to resume White House tours for school groups.
“This was not a decision that went up to the White House,” noted Obama in an ABC News interview aired on Wednesday, saying the directive came from the Secret Service.
“What I’m asking them is: are there ways, for example, for us to accommodate school groups who may have traveled here with some bake sales? Can we make sure that kids potentially can still come to tour?” Obama added.
I'm going to channel my inner Sam Kinison here:
"You don't ask, you dickless wonder, you're the freakin' President of the United States! You tell them!
/Kinison
Instead we get this pathetic mewling:
“What the Secret Service explained to us was that they were going to furlough some folks,” said Obama. “What furloughs mean is people are going to lose a day of work and a day of pay, and the question for them is how deeply do they have to furlough their staff and is it worth it to make sure that we got White House tours if it means you have a whole bunch of families who are depending on a paycheck who are suddenly seeing a 5 or 10 percent reduction in their pay?”
Bullshit. Bull-freakin'-shit.
Here's the reality according to a CNN story a couple of days ago:
According to the Office of Management and Budget, the Secret Service needs to cut $84 million from a remaining budget of roughly $1.6 billion, meaning that ending public tours of the White House only represents a small fraction of the reductions the agency will have to achieve if forced spending cuts known as ‘sequestration’ remain in effect.
That's 5.25%. The story also notes that cutting the tours out will save $2 million of the $84 million.
The idea that they can't find 5% to cut without hurting employees, in a large and well-funded agency such as the Secret Service, is not just absurd, it's insulting. Give me that budget for a day and I guarantee you I'll find a whole hell of a lot more than $84 million that can be cut without keeping kids out of the White House. No doubt millions of Americans who have had to deal with business and personal budget cuts the last four years could do the same.
It's one thing to have to grin and bear it when it comes to being on the losing end of a political battle, but this is far beyond politics and persuasion. The mind-numbing truth is the president is deliberately fucking with us here. Instead of faithfully executing his office, he has chosen to find the most harmful cuts to present to the American people in a crass and unworthy political ploy.
My initial flash of anger over how Obama is handling the sequester has faded to just a deep contempt. I've worked hard to remain respectful of Obama the last five years, but this sequester business is too much. He could have rolled with it and done the presidential thing, which would have been to rally the administration to serve the American people and find every bit of waste, inefficiency, and common sense belt-tightening it could. It would have been a chance to prove to America that the federal government could rise to the occasion and reform itself in the name of the people it supposedly serves.
Instead, we got President Dickhead.
How pathetic.
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