Obama's Disgraceful Border Dodge

From Jonathan Tobin, at Commentary:

Given the opportunity to demonstrate his concern and willingness to take charge of the ongoing fiasco that has overwhelmed U.S. border resources, President Obama chose instead to resort to his favorite pastime: bashing his political opponents.

To say that the president’s decision to schedule partisan fundraising events at the same time that the Rio Grande was being stormed by thousands of illegal aliens made for bad optics is an understatement. Even Democrats have compared his decision to avoid the border like the plague to President Bush’s flyby over a Hurricane Katrina-devastated New Orleans. As I wrote yesterday, that’s a bit unfair but the injured party is Bush, not Obama.

But even if we leave aside the sterile debate about whether Obama should have gone to the border, the problem now is how the president has exacerbated an already terrible situation. His defense of his choice to stay away from the problem was worse than the decision. Saying that he wasn’t interested in “photo-ops” or “theater” rang false even to liberals who know very well that a day rarely passes when the White House isn’t staging some dog-and-pony show where he is framed by the adoring faces of supporters standing by him. Moreover, it came just after time spent in Colorado where Obama pretended to hang out with ordinary people in front of cameras and then drank beer and played pool with the governor. And when he did speak, at least tangentially about the crisis today, the event was held … wait for it … in a theater where as usual, his advance team had assembled a chorus of fans to nod, laugh, and clap in all the right places.

But what was even more outrageous was the content of his speech. Instead of a sober, presidential assessment of a genuine crisis, he gave the country partisan rhetoric. Instead of a little much-needed introspection about how his statements and policies had, albeit unintentionally, set off a human wave of illegals seeking to get into the country where they expected to be allowed to stay, he gave us more jokes about the do-nothing Republicans in Congress...

More.

The president's an asshole who cares not one whit about the illegals aliens streaming over the border. Even Democrats are calling him out, like Rep. Henry Cuellar, who felt the wrath of the White House for not toeing the collectivist, open-borders line: