'The Internet Doesn’t Forget'

As Bryan Preston writes at the Tatler, “Staycation Nation to Watch President Present Go Off on Yet Another Vacation:”

I’d prefer Obama just stay put in Martha’s Vineyard where he can do less damage, but the left never cut George W. Bush a nanometer of slack when he went back to Texas for vacations. The left even propped up a grieving mother to camp out outside Bush’s property to harass him about the war, and then junked her once her usefulness was spent. So no mercy for President Downgrade, whose golf rounds in 2.5 years have already exceeded Bush’s in 8, and whose vacations have been opulent affairs in a time of national hardship.

And check this out, from way back in 2001.

The image-makers who advise George W. Bush got what they wanted this week: a photograph, taken by the Associated Press and published in seemingly every newspaper in the country, of the President lifting a telephone pole as he “helped maintain” a nature trail in Colorado’s Rocky Mountain National Park.

Back in July, when they were planning what the President should do during his month-long vacation (as part of their effort to persuade the public that he wasn’t actually on vacation in the generally accepted sense of what vacation means — i.e., having fun and not working), the image-makers hit upon a clever idea. Every week, they decided, they would send the President somewhere outside Texas for a day or a day and a half to hold an event of some kind in which he would mix with “real Americans.”

The events would have little in common, except for the fact that they would be held far from Washington in the middle of August. But to tie them together, to make it seem as though the President were engaged in some concentrated activity of presidential purpose, they would name the entire series of trips — together with his down time at his ranch in Crawford, Texas — the “Home to the Heartland” tour.

Who was that writer picking at President Bush’s vacation activities? None other than Jay Carney. The Internet doesn’t forget, Jay.

That was only a few months after Time described then-President Bush, who had two terms as governor of Texas, business experience, and a father who was a former president as “the least experienced presidential nominee of modern times.” As Tim Graham of Newsbusters wrote in 2009 while reminding readers of Time‘s hit piece, “That’s no longer true, but you wouldn’t see that phrase laid on Obama.”

Especially not by his current press secretary, who shared a byline on the 2001 article.

More Memory Hole fun with Carney here.