Andrew Breitbart: Mall Cop

Jeffrey Jena is in “here’s a question that I think is devastatingly rhetorical, but is really easily answered with 5 seconds of googling” mode again.

I was amused when the White House announced that it was going to look into the whole flap surrounding the buzzing of The Statue of Liberty and Lower Manhattan by Air Force One a few days ago.

The White House announced that it was unaware of the plan to scare the pants off of half of one of America’s busiest cities and had “just found out about it.” Really, is someone out joyriding in the president’s plane around New York without permission? What if there had been a national emergency and he had to rush out to Edwards AFB.

“Hey, where is my ride?”

There are, in fact, two identical planes designated with the call-sign “Air Force One,” one of which is used almost exclusively as a backup and for photo-op situations like this one.  As this whole thing was set up through DoD, it’s completely unsurprising that the White House hadn’t been involved or well-informed.  

Here is the kicker. The Obama team prides itself in how they are so, twittered up, tech savvy and Internet geeky but apparently none of these folks have ever heard of a little think called Adobe Photoshop!  Forget flying around New Your Harbor. I could have shown The President’s jet sitting in the middle of the Rose Bowl, buzzing Kim Jong Il’s palace or pulling the Dallas Cowboy Cheerleaders water-skiing across Crater Lake!

Jena is stealing this bit from the New York Daily News, without sourcing, but yeah, again, as every article I can find about this incident clearly points out, this was a DoD operation.  The argument that our government should be ‘shopping photo-ops whenever possible does strike me as a weird one; as if the Freepers wouldn’t make themselves pass out by screaming “ORWELL! ORWELL!” over and over at the prospect of such a thing.

If anything, the lesson here is just that DoD has a shitty press department, and someone should probably do something about that.