In "response" to tweeted questions by the two outlets peddling the story, resident White House moron wrangler Dan Pfeiffer cheekily suggested that the White House had other priorities. He once again neglected to recognize that morons do not understand sarcasm:
In response to a journalist's Twitter query about what could be more important, Pfeiffer wrote: "Oh, I don't know, there's this whole website thing that someone suggested might destroy the [Democratic] Party."
... which naturally led to actual goddamn stories suggesting that Obama did not go to Gettysburg because of Obamacarez.
I suppose the main question here is which of these various shameless dunderhacks was the one who first came up with this as a plausible attack line—I am loathe to pin that on the Breitbart crowd when it could have been tossed over their transom by an even more eager shit-for-brains, or perhaps there is a collection of fabled shit-for-brains pundits that gets together each evening to determine who among them has the most foam-laden idea for an attack piece and they all clap their little hands together and run with it. That would mean all the others saw it floating around and said I believe I shall run with this, which makes them even more goddamn stupid and hackish than the original stupid hacks.
Now here is the key point, dear reader, and the reason why shit for brains ought not to be considered a crass insult at this point but merely a reasonable medical diagnosis. In all of American post-Lincoln history, only one sitting president has ever gone to Gettysburg on the anniversary of the address. Reagan did not go. The Bushii did not go. JFK did not go. Roosevelt never went, nor Nixon, nor President Biff the Unholy, Destroyer of Worlds. That honor apparently goes to Taft, and it has been a long damn time since anyone in the national press furrowed their brows and pondered what William Howard Taft would do in a given situation.
So no, we do not have to take any of this seriously. Nor do we have to take the purveyors of such obviously stupid faux-scandals seriously. Nor do we have to treat them with respect, or pretend for a bare minute that they have anything worthwhile to say about our political discourse that could not be better said by contemplating the contents of a litter box. The problem here is that there is no shame to be had in peddling conspiratorial trash in public. In better days people would cross to the other side of the street so that they would not have to listen to the nice man on the large box preaching about how President Obama is probably not attending the event only one other president in history (well, two, counting Lincoln himself) attended, and how that probably means the current president resents the tardiness of Brown v. Board of Education, and when a newspaper man walks up to that fellow with a notebook in hand, nodding and scribbling things down, that does not make it suddenly respectable. It only means there are two nuts standing on a street corner instead of one.
Cross to the other side, America. For the sake of pride and patriotism, will you just shun these damn people already?