Is there anything that Conservatives and Fox News won't blame Barack Obama for?

Fox News host Harris Faulkner suggested on Monday that President Barack Obama had spurred the recent trend of people taking inappropriate photographs of themselves at Auschwitz and sites of other tragedies. Over the weekend, The New York Post blasted “self-absorbed jerks” who had posted “selfies” of themselves in front of the site of an explosion in East Village. By Monday, Fox News had found a way to link the distasteful photographs to the president…. “When the president does it, you’ve got a whole new generation now,” Faulkner opined. “I’m not just picking on the older adults and protecting the little kids.”…. “But you’ve got a bar that’s moving now,” she explained. “That gold standard isn’t what it used to be. You’ve got on a weekend, we’re talking Islamic state, we’re talking all sorts of things, and you’ve got a president with a selfie stick that’s as tall as I am taking pictures of himself[.]

I’ve long since grown accustomed to the idea that there are those on the Far Right (some of whom happen to work for Fox News Channel) who’d hold The Black Guy in the White House © responsible for everything from the Lindbergh kidnapping to the Tet Offensive to Teletubbies. It’s the political version of theater of the absurd (somewhere warm and breezy, Eugene Ionesco weeps inconsolably into his Dos Equis), and no rational person could take any of this seriously…because those blaming the President aren’t themselves serious people. The get paid to run down this President at any opportunity; lacking any fact-based arguments to use against him, they resort to everything from the sublime to the just plain ridiculous. It’s what the Far Right has done for the past six-plus years, and while it would be to hold them in contempt, their tactics are unlikely to change this late in the game.

That said, the latest attack on The Black Guy in the White House © is about as thoroughly brain-dead and insulting as anything I’ve heard to date. The idea that the President has a responsibility to set an example in order that suggestible maroons with double-digit IQs don’t misbehave is absurd. I frequently hear the criticism that The Black Guy in the White House © is being “unPresidential,” though no one seems to be able to explain just what acting “Presidential” really means. Perhaps it’s like Justice Louis Brandeis’ definition of pornography: “I know it when I see it”- meaning, I suppose, that there are as many definitions of acting “Presidential” as there are people who’d care to formulate such a definition. If you’re thinking that this means The Black Guy in the White House © is damned if he does and damned if he doesn’t, you wouldn’t be far wrong. Turns out there are those so desperate to see this President fail that they’ll throw anything at him in the hope that something- ANYTHING- will stick.