.@pfeiffer44 @jmartNYT @jfsolnet I would make a joke about POTUS writing code but Gettysburg is not a laughing matter. You mock, tho. Tnx.
— Ron Fournier (@ron_fournier) November 19, 2013
Ed Morrissey has the details in a read-the-whole-thing-post, including additional tweets from Dan Pfeiffer, Senior Advisor to the President for Strategy and Communications to the National Journal’s Ron Fouriner, blaming the president’s absence on the Obamacare Website. It’s as if, as Jennifer Granholm grimly joked on Meet the Press at the end of October, Obama’s going to be sitting in front of a terminal writing Web code himself.
As Ed notes, Pfeiffer takes the presidential tone of his job so seriously, he “most recently compared Republicans to suicide bombers for trying to derail ObamaCare through the budget process,” along with the series of flippant tweets to Fouriner, including the one above. Considering that at the start of the month, Pfeiffer also employed his White House twitter account to attack the cancer patient who had the temerity to write about losing her policy in the Wall Street Journal, presumably he’s simply trying to modulate his tone until it reaches Martin Bashir-like levels, to warm up for the MSNBC gig that’s sure come.
Hey, the Civil War, socialized medicine as the left’s Moral Equivalent of War, Democrats believing that they’re at war with Republicans, all the same thing, right?
In the meantime, as Ed concludes:
Forget for the moment the “flippant” attitude the White House is taking with both the Gettysburg commemoration and the ObamaCare disaster. What strategist in his right mind would be advising Obama to skip this opportunity to repair his standing with voters? This administration has run completely off the rails.
Especially when added to this telling detail: Obama dropped the words “under God” from the conclusion of his reading of Lincoln’s speech for PBS leftwing documentarian, the Beatles haircut coiffed Ken Burns. At the PJ Tatler, Bryan Preston writes:
President Obama has elected to skip today’s commemoration of the 150th anniversary of President Abraham Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address. But he participated in video readings of the address for a Ken Burns project. Along with 61 other lawmaker and celebrity participants, Obama read the address on camera from a teleprompter. But unlike the other participants, all of whom recited the entire address, Chris Plante noticed that Barack Obama left out two words: “Under God.”
[jwplayer config=”pjmedia_eddriscoll” mediaid=”68982″]
The omission occurs at 1:35 in the above video.
The WMAL Website adds:
As first reported on WMAL’s Chris Plante Show Tuesday, the Commander-in-Chief joined a cast of 61 other noted lawmakers, politicians, news anchors and celebrities, including every living President, in reciting the Gettysburg Address, which President Abraham Lincoln delivered on November 19, 1863.
The dignitaries all delivered the address as Lincoln had written it, including the phrase, “that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom.” (Click to listen). Curiously, however, in his version of the address, President Obama omitted the words “under God.”
Bryan adds, “This is not the first time Barack Obama has made this omission.”
As with Ron Burgundy, who’s programming the president’s teleprompter these days?
Update: The response to Pfeiffer’s petulant tone from Twitter users is just brutal: “The WH is losing it.”
More: So where is the president instead of Gettysburg, and who is there in his place?
On Tuesday, just 65 miles from the White House, thousands will gather at the battlefield where 150 years ago the sacrifice and bloodshed and deaths of warring Americans were immortalized by the words of President Abraham Lincoln. Fifty-one thousand casualties were counted when the fighting ceased in 1863, including 8,000 deaths, a toll that Lincoln, in his Gettysburg Address, pledged the nation “can never forget.”
But among the thousands in attendance will not be President Obama. For reasons not spelled out by the White House, he is staying in Washington. Instead of going to Gettysburg, he will go to the Four Seasons Hotel to address The Wall Street Journal CEO Council’s annual meeting and talk about the economy. In his place, he has dispatched little-known Secretary of the Interior Sally Jewell to the ceremonies.
As Moe Lane writes at Red State, “Secretary of the Interior. Well, now we know who the lowest person is in the Cabinet pecking order.”
Indeed.™
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