It’s well-established by now that, with the possible exception of agreeing to being lynched on the White House lawn, there is virtually nothing Pres. Obama could do that Republicans would support. No matter what he does, or does not do, they and their lapdogs in the “liberal media” will reflexively carp and complain.
Their current carp is that Pres. Obama signaled a lack of solidarity with France when he opted not to appear at the unity rally in Paris after the terror attacks there last week. A (poorly punctuated) Fox News headline summed up GOP upsetness: “Obama AWOL in Paris: Message to America, Allies Is We Don’t Care.”
Of course, had the president flown to Paris, Fox et al would be complaining now that he’d wasted money on travel and security to participate in what they would otherwise view as a substance-less, feel-good Kumbaya moment with other socialist world leaders.
This latest episode comes with an extra dollop of irony, of course, because it wasn’t so very long ago that these same right-wingers were rattling their swords at the French because France had refused to participate in Bush-Cheney’s misbegotten invasion of Iraq.
France’s refusal prompted Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, one of the blood-thirstiest of the war-mongers, to disparage America’s oldest ally as being part of “old Europe” (whatever that meant). But the low point of Republican high dudgeon came in March 2003 when House Administration Chairman Bob Ney unilaterally changed the name of french fries on the menus in Capitol cafeterias to “freedom fries.” (Four years later Ney went to prison for 17 months after being convicted on corruption charges.)
In the end, however, it turned out that France was right not to support the invasion and occupation of Iraq, which stands as the biggest military disaster in U.S. history. The fervor for freedom fries faded as support for the war diminished.
Today France has suddenly become a most-favored nation among American conservatives, second only to Israel, apparently. Right wingers have conveniently forgotten how they despised all things French just 12 years ago because they see the president’s absence from the Paris rally as fodder for feeding their bottomless appetite for despising all things Obama.
Whether it’s on small matters such as flip-flopping from freedom fries to Francophiles in little over a decade or momentous about-faces like the GOP’s collective decision to oppose the individual mandate in the Affordable Care Act, even though it was invented at a Republican think tank and first enacted into law by Mitt Romney when he was governor of Massachusetts, the GOP has executed this sort of 180-degree reversal on their positions so regularly now that no one seems to notice.