"...everybody in the country is going to have to sacrifice something, accept change for the greater good. Everybody is going to have to give. Everybody is going to have to have some skin in the game." - President Barack Hussein Obama
Well, as Orwell famously said, some animals are more equal than others.
As details of First Lady Michelle Obama's Spanish vacation leak out, a lot of American taxpayers' jaws are dropping at the extravagance when much of the nation is struggling and whole sectors of the US economy could easily be said to be on life support.
The First Lady is staying in Spain's Costa del Sol with her youngest daughter Sasha at the five-star Villa Padierna, a millionaire's playground rated as one of the world's top 30 hotels, with 40 friends, her personal entourage....and booking sixty,yes sixty hotel rooms. Based on a cost of $700 per night for the Secret Service peons and $3, 100 per night for the luxury rooms for the Royal Family and their special guests, I would say the hotel rooms alone are costing the American taxpayer between $50,000 and $70,000 per night.
The First Lady and her guests flew in on Air Force Two, with probably a second plane for the Secret Service and the less favored members of her entourage. The tab for that is about $150,000 for the round trip - not counting time on the ground or the food and beverage bill both ways.
The American taxpayer will also cover the cost of the only official part of the holiday, a visit the First Lady and her posse are scheduled to pay to the Spanish royal family on the island of Majorca.
Total cost? Probably between $400-500 thousand. But whose counting when you're spending other people's money?
And this is by no means the end of it. By the end of this summer,Michelle Obama will have enjoyed no less than eight tax payer funded holidays -including her trip to Los Angeles last June, a visit to the Florida's Gulf Coast next weekend and a ten-day trip to Martha's Vineyard later in August.
This is not mere envy on my part. I could care less what the Obama's do with their money. But I do have concerns with what they do with ours.
If this kind of luxury jaunt was really vacation was really an absolute necessity at a time when a lot of Americans are wondering how they're going to pay their bills, why Spain? Why not California, which has equally wonderful hotels and beaches and where the money would at least benefit the American economy that desperately needs it?
The truth of it is, the Obamas are so out of touch with what the average American thinks and feels that this probably didn't even occur to them.
Yet another example of this are President Obama's frequent rounds of golf. Whatever one might say about George W. Bush, he understood the symbolism of that.
President Bush actually gave up playing golf once the Iraq and Afghanistan wars started - because, in President Bush's own words, "I don't want some mom whose son may have recently died to see the Commander-in-Chief playing golf."
"I feel I owe it to the families to be as - to be in solidarity as best as I can with them. And I think playing golf during a war just sends the wrong signal."
Of all people, Peggy Noonan, an Obama fan, hints at this disconnect in latest piece, where she talks about the country 'boiling over' because it's Ruling Class is so out of touch with the concerns of ordinary Americans.
As a certified flack for the Ruling Class, Noonan of course blames 'Washington' as a whole for being so out of touch. But to quote an old Russian proverb, a fish always rots from the head.
Just like the 18th Century French Bourbons, the Obamas and their minions remain clueless.
Good post. You took the words right out of my mouth :)
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