Versailles on the Potomac

What is it about the Obamas that causes people peering through the glass at the White House to start seeing flashbacks to the excesses of life under the French court before the Revolution? I don’t mean casual “dates” via Air Force One to catch a Broadway show in Manhattan, inconveniencing the country’s largest city. And I certainly don’t expect the American President and his wife to have leftover meatloaf for dinner. But the image we see of the Obamas via the besotted press is one of wretched excess.

In a time when nearly a quarter of America’s population is either unemployed or underemployed, the Obamas can’t seem to help themselves.


(Masque of the Red Death Ball at the White House)

From the Torrington, CT., Register Citizen: No Taco Bell for this in-crowd

Maybe it wasn’t quite the equal of Versailles in the heydays of French monarchial extravagance. But the White House state dinner in honor of Mexico’s president certainly impressed the courtiers of the media. And why not? The gala social event did, after all, attract the top glitterati of Hollywood’s limousine liberal community.

And as if that weren’t more than sufficient cause to ooh and ahh, First Lady Michelle Obama made her regal entrance garbed in — the gawking, star-struck media chroniclers tell us — “a one-shouldered, sky-blue gown by designer Peter Soronen, cinched at the waist with a sparkly crystal-adorned belt.” For the occasion, her hubby was smartly decked out, of course, in a tux. Tables for the 200 guests were covered in triple-striped linens in “hues of Mayan blue,” and centerpieces were “handmade woven baskets gilded and filled with bouquets of fuchsia and purple gray roses, orchids, geranium foliage and prickly pear cactus.” The vittles were whipped up by guest chef Rick Bayless and included “Oregon Wagyu beef in Oaxacan black mole.”

You get the picture. No corn chips and dip out of the supermarket jar for this in-crowd. Meanwhile, President Obama and Mexico’s Felipe Calderone took a moment to offer appropriately supercilious remarks regarding the increasingly restless Tea Party peons in places like Arizona. They have turned to “potentially discriminatory” measures out of their “frustration,” said the president north of the border. This frustration apparently stems from their unschooled belief that their government ought to make at least a half-hearted effort at enforcing the nation’s immigration laws rather than ignoring these laws as a gesture of pandering to the growing Hispanic portion of the electorate.

The president south of the border subtly suggested that perhaps the Arizona ruffians’ judgment has been clouded by over-imbibing the firewater of bigotry.

You might have thought the president of Mexico would have had other concerns in the forefront of his mind besides an Arizona state law. With the nodding Obama serving as his amen corner, Calderone complained that there are divisive troublemakers in the United States who are bent on “criminalizing immigration.” Actually, it’s the United States that holds illegal immigration to be a misdemeanor and Mexico that holds illegal entry onto its soil to be a felony.

Before anybody could take exception to El Presidente’s point, however, it was time to be seated and dig into the “salad of jicama with oranges, grapefruit and pineapple citrus vinaigrette and the herb-green ceviche.”

What about the millions of destitute south of the border and the millions of unemployed or under-employed north of it?

As Marie Antoinette might have said had she been included on the guest list: “Let ’em eat tacos.”

Now that you mention it, there is an amazing similarity between Marie Antoinette and Michelle Obama.

UPDATE:  Doug Ross comments: "Let them eat Wagyu."