21st Century Emperor and Horse Finally Meet in Denver

Rome’s Caligula was famous for fawning over his horse Incitatus, about whom Wikipedia, our modern-day Oracle of Delphi tells us:

…was the favored horse of Roman emperor Caligula (reigned 37–41 AD). His name is a Latin adjective meaning “swift” or “at full gallop”.

According to Suetonius’s Lives of the Twelve Caesars (121 AD), Incitatus had a stable of marble, with an ivory manger, purple blankets, and a collar of precious stones. Dio Cassius has indicated that the horse was attended to by servants, and was fed oats mixed with gold flake. Suetonius also wrote that it was said that Caligula planned to make Incitatus a consul, and that the horse would “invite” dignitaries to dine with him in a house outfitted with servants there to entertain such events.

Our own 21st century would-be Roman emperor had an equally surreal equine encounter yesterday during his fund-raising jaunt to Denver, which had terrible optics even before the above run-in. “You might remember Horse Head Guy running down the street during Hurricane Sandy,” Ace wrote last night. I don’t know if this is that Horse Head Guy, or one of his many imitators/cultists.”

With the border crisis threatening to become Obama’s Katrina moment, as Allahpundit notes at Hot Air, even dedicated Obama groupies such as Michael Tomasky of the Daily Beast are questioning the president’s decisions:

For one thing, there is the specific parallel of the flyover: Obama was going to Texas for a fundraiser but wasn’t planning on going to the border? I usually try to ask myself what I’d be saying if a Republican did X, and if a Republican did that, I’d be teeing off. It’s not defensible.

Second, Obama is at a really vulnerable point in his presidency, I think, not dissimilar to the point George W. Bush was at in August 2005, when Katrina hit. Then, Bush’s approval rating was generally in the mid-40s, as Obama’s is now. Hanging on, but vulnerable to one straw that could break the camel’s back…

I don’t understand it. I covered New York mayors. When a crisis hits, you go. If it’s 3 in the f***ing morning and way out in some part of Staten Island you’ve never even heard of, you go. Obama should have been in Texas or California or Arizona last week.

“None of that explains the good times with Horsehead and the new Choom Gang in Denver yesterday,” Allahpundit responds:

Why do that when even liberals are nervous about the optics here? I assume O’s thinking (a) that the public’s attention span for all news not related to missing jumbo jets is now down to about 35 minutes, which means this will all be distant, distant memory by the time people go to vote in November, and (b) he’s going to infuriate border hawks pretty soon anyway when he issues his mass amnesty for the millions of adult illegals who are already here. In which case, why not laugh in their faces while doing it? Where’s the fun in being a lame-duck king who can rewrite federal law on a whim if you have to walk around looking grim and pretend-worried all the time? Next time someone offers him a joint, he should take it. Choom on, big guy.

DNC Vice Chairwoman Donna Brazile finally admitted last year at CNN that in reality, “Bush came through on Katrina.” But that didn’t stop the media from creating a massive hurricane of their own in the fall of 2005, which certainly aided in their party retaking control of the House and Senate the following year. And as Scott Ott writes elsewhere at PJM, there are at least three reasons “Why the Border Crisis Is Much Worse Than ‘Obama’s Katrina Moment:’”

#1. Immigration is, constitutionally, a federal responsibility. Disaster relief is not. President Calvin Coolidge actually refused to travel to the disaster region after the Great Flood of 1927 — a move he viewed as political grandstanding, accomplishing nothing. Coolidge resisted efforts to make flood control a federal issue, believing private property owners were responsible. But immigration, unquestionably, belongs in the federal arena.

So will the border crisis become Obama’s “Katrina moment?” Well, it won’t be because of the MSM, which created that “moment” in the first place, Mickey Kaus noted back in September of 2005:

[Katrina] and its New Orleans aftermath at least seemed to solve a big problem for anti-Bush commentators and politicians. Previously, they couldn’t grouse about the Iraq War without seeming defeatist (and anti-liberationist and maybe even selfishly isolationist). Even the Clintons never figured a way out of that trap. But nature has succeeded where they failed; it has opened up a way out, at least temporarily. Now Bush opponents can argue, in some cases quite accurately, that without the Iraq deployment aid would have gotten to New Orleans faster. And ‘if we can [tk] in Iraq, why can’t we [tk] in our own South?’ They aren’t being selfish. They are just asserting priorities! In short, Katrina gives them a way to talk about Iraq without talking about Iraq. No wonder Gwen Ifill smiles the “inner smile.”

Since Ifill and the rest of the MSM function as Democrat operatives with bylines, any attempt at creating a similar Katrina-like association for Obama likely won’t be coming from the MSM anytime soon, which means, as Allapundit writes, Barry really is free to choom on and/or party on with Incitatus.

Though I would advise against wearing dog masks around our modern-day Caligula-lite. Just sayin’.