GOODY TWO SHOES: Let Them Eat Steak!: Part IV
Not satisfied with the MSM’s anemic efforts to find out how much President Barack Obama’s dinner-and-a-show date with wife Michelle cost taxpayers, Joseph Curl of The Washington Times took a stab at figuring it out himself. Adding: Three choppers (two of them decoys) + ground and air traffic crews + three jets for the First Couple and their entourage + security personnel (Secret Service, police officers in D.C. and NYC being paid overtime for working on the week-end, a full motorcade flown in to NYC by military transport) + EMS crew and ambulance in NYC = Roughly $250K, which is a helluva lot more than the measly $195 Obama put his hand in his pocket for to buy two orchestra seats and about the same amount for dinner at Blue Hill.
Reader Nick From NY is outraged – for one thing, he got caught in the massive traffic tie-up that Obama’s jaunt created:
It’s amazing that George W. Bush was excoriated over his trips to Crawford, which really only cost the taxpayers the flight to TX and security measures that were amortized over the frequency of these trips to a fortified destination, with no real disruption to the local economy or standard of living.
Whenever diplomats come to midtown NYC, their presence is felt by everybody. Traffic patterns are shot to Hell - not only in Manhattan but also the parts of Queens, Brooklyn and Jersey that are linked to NYC by bridges and tunnels. Outbound traffic at the Lincoln Tunnel was at a standstill at 11 p.m. Friday night. It took two hours to travel just three blocks, so we drove 10 miles out of our way to take the George Washington Bridge into Jersey instead.
WCBS 880 and WINS 1010 were reporting “minor delays” until I called them and set them straight. The only explanation we ever heard on the radio was that there was “police activity in the area.” [Curl’s article explains the Secret Service was in NYC days before the Big Date mapping out the routes the motorcade would take.]
Then on Sunday morning (the day after O’Scammer was supposed to have gone back to D.C.) inbound traffic to Manhattan on the on the Weehawken, NJ, side of the Lincoln Tunnel was backed up – and nobody knew why. Was O’Scammer really gone, or did he and his Princess Bride sleep over in the lavish Presidential Suite of some posh celebrity hotel? We may never know.
If he really wanted to see the August Wilson play that badly, it would have been cheaper and less disruptive to bring the entire production down to D.C. for a few days.
Editorial Note: Just like Obama flew a pizza chef and his crew over to D.C. from St. Louis back in April. And not to detract from Nick’s ordeal, for her part The Stiletto is outraged that MO can’t ever seem to find a purse that matches either the color of her shoes or her dress.
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