Monday, January 12, 2015

"WHY DID THE PRESIDENT'S TRIP TO FRANCE COST SO MUCH?"

I'm not going to pass judgment on President Obama's decision not to attend this weekend's march in Paris, but I can't help noticing that some of the people complaining about this...



... are the same folks who were recently whinging about this:



The source for the Fox Nation post about the Obamas' vacation is this item at Watchdog.org, a project of the right-wing, Koch-affiliated Franklin Center for Government and Public Integrity. Here, according to Watchdog.org, are some of the appalling costs contributing to the "massive tab" for the Obama family's vacation:
The U.S. Secret Service doesn’t disclose information about the expense for its agents to travel to and stay in Hawaii or guard the first family.

Dozens of Secret Service agents were spotted at Ala Moana Hotel checking in the day before Obama arrived. A spokeswoman for the hotel said she couldn’t release details on the number of agents who stayed there, but hotel staff told Watchdog the government rate would be about $200 a night, including taxes.

Secret Service agents, Navy SEALs and Coast Guard officials also rent private homes along the canal near the president in Kailua at a cost of $250 per room per night, according to several residents renting their homes.
These sorts of accommodations are made to protect every president. They would have been made for President McCain or President Romney. But the right begrudges the costs when the president is a Democrat. Assuming the president's security detail could be mobilized on such short notice, a very short trip o would have cost a lot -- and the cost per hour would have been the subject of endless complaints in the right-wing media.

Or, of course, the president could have trusted the host government to provide security -- the same host government that allowed the Charlie Hebdo attack to be conducted by people who've been on America's no-fly list for years.

So the president would have needed a costly security apparatus. And the right would have resented every penny that cost.

3 comments:

Ken_L said...

Governments spend months organising security arrangements for head-of-government meetings like G20 and APEC. Even the modest showing for the march in Paris must have been a nightmare for French security. There is no way they could have coped with a bigger influx of foreign heads of government at 36 hours notice, especially if one was Obama. I suspect most of their resources were devoted to looking after Netanyahu, who crashed the party after being told to stay away and then behaved even more boorishly then usual, if that's possible.

Glennis said...

$200 a night? $250 a night? Sounds like a pretty good rate in Hawaii.

Going hotel rate in my home town is around $450.

Victor said...

If President Obama had gone, the Reich would have twisted it into, 'He's not going to honor the victims. He's going to honor the terrorists.'

You can't win, with Conservatives.
They'll damn whatever someone who's not part of their clan will do.