“Barack Obama provoked fury in the U.S. by casually devoting mere moments to the deaths of 295 people aboard a Malaysian airliner on Thursday in Wilmington, Delaware, and then launching into jokes and his prepared remarks on the need to expand America’s transportation infrastructure,” the London Daily Mail reports:
Twenty-three Americans are feared dead after the jetliner crashed in eastern Ukraine.
Obama declared that ‘it looks like it may be a terrible tragedy, but not before enthusiastically declaring that ‘it is wonderful to be back in Delaware.’
‘Before I begin, obviously the world is watching reports of a downed passenger jet near the Russia-Ukraine border. And it looks like it may be a terrible tragedy. Right now we’re working to determine whether there were American citizens on board. That is our first priority.’
‘And I’ve directed my national security team to stay in close contact with the Ukrainian governemnt. The United States will offer any assistance we can to help determine what happened and why. And as a country, our thoughts and prayers are with all the families and passengers, wherever they call home.
Obama quickly returned to his prepared remarks.
‘I want to thank Jeremie for that introduction’ he said. ‘Give Jeremie a big round of applause.’
‘It is great to be in the state that gave us Joe Biden. We’ve got actually some better-looking Bidens with us here today. We’ve got Beau and his wife, Hallie, are here. Give them a big round of applause. We love them.’
Obama also acknowledged the presence of Treasury Secretary Jack Lew with a joke.
‘Jack Lew’s signature is actually on your money,’ he said, ‘although it’s kind of illegible. We teased him when he first became treasury secretary that he was going to have to fix his signature a little bit because it looked just like a caterpillar running along the bottom.’
From there he launched into a 16-minute speech about transportation projects he wants Republicans to fund, complaining bitterly about their objections to his end-runs around the federal legislature.
See, that’s the problem when the president is utterly dependent on his speech writers and teleprompter programmer that he’ll relentlessly stick to the script on such a grim news day, one in which 23 Americans were reported killed.
Meanwhile, with State Department spokeswoman Jen Psaki also ignoring the disaster in the Ukraine while “briefing” the press today, Allahpundit speculates that goal by Mr. Obama and Psaki is to make the White House appear as if “They’re in control of the narrative, not the media — or at least they want to be. In reality, [Fox’s Sheppard Smith] and Jennifer Griffin are laughing at them and going back to covering the crash. Baffling, but this is where we are with two and a half years to go.”
How bad was Mr. Obama’s performance today? So awful that even Obama groupie Piers Morgan can figure it out:
President Obama massively dropped the ball just now. 23 Americans killed and he says ‘it looks like a terrible tragedy’ then back to jokes?
— Piers Morgan (@piersmorgan) July 17, 2014
Update: Jim Geraghty adds, “Some Days, It Feels Like We Don’t Have a President:”
This is the president who didn’t address the country for three days after the attempted bombing of an airliner over Detroit on Christmas Day 2009, who gave a “shout-out” to an audience member moments before his first comments on the Fort Hood shooting, and who attended a campaign rally on September 12, 2012, when most Americans awoke to the news of the murder of four Americans in a terror attack in Benghazi, Libya.
I understand the Obama White House never wants to look like they’re overreacting. They behave as if it’s impossible to underreact.
Note the empty chair in the photo at the bottom of Jim’s post.
Flashback: In sharp contrast to all of the above, “This is how an American president should address Russian aggression.”
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