Avlon: India Trip is Newest Wingnut Conspiracy
The John Avlon writes:
“A lie can travel halfway round the world while the truth is putting on its shoes, ” Mark Twain once famously said. In the Internet age, the speed of a politically motivated lie is even faster—case in point, the Wingnuts’ fact-free, post-election pile-on over President Obama’s trip to India.
The conspiracy theory du jour is an alleged $2 billion price tag for the president’s trip, which would be offensive and imperial indeed if it had any basis in fact. But (almost) needless to say, it doesn’t.
Rep. Michele Bachmann first brought up the India trip expenses two days ago in response to a question from CNN’s Anderson Cooper about what budget cuts she would support.
But specific policy plans aren’t as satisfying as demagoguery, so she pivoted to attack mode.
“The president of the United States will be taking a trip over to India that is expected to cost the taxpayers $200 million a day,” she said. “He’s taking 2,000 people with him. He will be renting out over 870 rooms in India. And these are five-star hotel rooms at the Taj Mahal Palace Hotel. This is the kind of over-the-top spending... it’s a very small example, Anderson. And I think this is an example of the massive overspending that we have seen, not only just in the last two years, really in the last four. That’s what we saw at the ballot box last evening.”
Soon Glenn Beck was calling the business investment outreach trip “a vacation where you needed 34 warships and $2 billion.” Michael Savage described it as “this incredible royalist visit.” The talk-radio circuit and right-wing blogosphere was burning with manufactured outrage.
A political rumor usually takes hold in people’s minds because it surfs off a pre-existing negative narrative. In this case, the initial impulse builds off accusations of fiscal irresponsibility. But they quickly turn to “King Obama” assignations, which in this White House occupant’s case are not just arrogant out-of-touch elitists or even wannabe Third World dictators. He feels entitled. Entitled, get it?
Here’s El Rushbo’s take, filed under “Obama Family Feels Entitled to Lavish India Trip”:
“We had a caller with a good question regarding Obama’s trip to India: ‘Is he coming back or fleeing to exile?’ I have a different theory. I don’t know what are the policy reasons that Obama’s going to India. I have no idea. But the idea that you’re going to take 3,000 people and you’re booking over 500 rooms in a hotel and you’re taking 40 airplanes, what that tells me is that you have a guy and a family who thinks this nation owes ’em. And while they’re in a position to, they are going to live off of this country as much as they can. They are gonna get theirs. That’s what this tells me. No president has ever had anywhere close to 40 airplanes, 3,000 people, 500 rooms in one hotel. And that’s just one hotel, for a 10-day trip, $200 million a day. It’s never been done before. This is somebody that says, ‘It’s my turn. My turn, our turn to get what has been denied us all these years,’ that’s what I think.”
Somehow, criticisms of the fictitious costs of the trip pivot to a sense of entitlement, with a hint of reparations—“you have a guy and a family who thinks this nation owes ’em…This is somebody that says, ‘It’s my turn. My turn, our turn to get what has been denied us all these years.’” It’s not just “the affirmative action” presidency, as some folks on the far right have called President Obama—it’s the president as welfare queen, living it up on the taxpayers’ dime, motivated by a sense of revenge.
