News Comments, Part 1

There were a couple of items in the news recently that I wanted to comment about, just because I can:

There was a report last week that President Obama’s trip to India was going to cost the taxpayers 200 million dollars a day.  When did I first hear about this?  I was telling someone about my trip to Washington and she turned to me with such anger that I literally stepped back.

“Did you go to the White House and ask Obama why he is spending 200 million dollars a day on his trip to India?”, she shouted at me.

“What???”, I replied.

She repeated it and said that it all over the news.

“Well,” I said, “I hadn’t heard about it so anyway….” And I proceeded to tell her about my trip.

Later I looked it up (I Googled it) and found out that a low level Indian official had been reported in the Daily Mail (a British tabloid) that the Obama administration was spending that money on the trip and bringing 3,000 staff members with him and there would be something like 34 warships off the coast in order to protect him.  Fox News picked up on this, right wing pundits crowed about it and all of a sudden it is being reported as fact.

Actually, it was completely made up.  A pentagon spokesman actually laughed and said they wouldn’t be deploying a third of the US fleet to India for this (which is what that number of warships represented).  Other people denied it because the figures were just simply ludicrous.

So, since it has proven to be false, do you think the person who became so angry about it and jumped down my throat is going to apologize for insulting the President and his administration?  I’m guessing she won’t.  People like that rarely do admit when they are mistaken or reporting false information.  They are already off on their next tangent and have completely forgotten the venom they spread earlier.  That’s just the way it is…

I will comment on the second item in tomorrow’s posting.