Criticizing the President

So the latest thing Obama is being criticized for is his "latte salute" to his Marine guards.  I am no fan of Obama's administration, but this is just ridiculous.  There are lots of things going on in the Whitehouse which are bad for America's future as a free country, so let's focus on those instead of some minor faux-pas.  But if we want to scrutinize that insignificant moment, let's do so fully.  Did the President break any rules by doing that?  Is he required to salute?  Actually, it would appear not.

Saluting is usually reserved for military members in uniform showing respect for one another and "the uniform."  (For example, this why in Top Gun, when the civilian specialist is introduced, the pilots are reminder not to salute her.)  Presidents used to never salute their military guards, including Eisenhower, who had been a general, and must have deliberately broken the habit once he left military office.  Reagan started the tradition, and encouraged Bush to continue it, and it has lived on.  Initially there was some concern over the practice, but the position of the military was that the president could salute whoever he wanted to.  Constitutionally this makes sense, because the President is supposed to direct the military, not the other way around.  It is good to have respect for existing traditions, but if the military had made a big deal about trying to prohibit Reagan from saluting, it would have set a bad precedent for the military dictating the president's actions in more important aspects of their relationship.

So it became a tradition for the president to salute his guards, and Obama is under fire, not for not saluting, but for doing it sloppily-one time.  Now I am all for the principle of "if you are going to do something, make sure you do it right," and I see all sorts of fallout from the American government making a habit of ignoring that maxim.  But it is a stretch to apply that principle to this situation.  Clearly Obama's detractors will jump on anything he does to criticize him.  It led me to wonder, would it be possible for him to do something they would actually support?

I couldn't think of anything he could do that would be above criticism from somewhere.  If he promised to give everyone free money, which he pretty much has, there are those who know where that is coming from.  What if it wasn't coming from taxpayers, like if he announced that he had convinced a few billionaires to voluntarily pay off the entire national debt as an act of patriotism?  There would be complaints about how that would affect the economy, and that the money could have been put to better use elsewhere, as well as the reasonable concern about what he may have secretly promised them in return.  Anytime a decision they agree with is announced, people will assume it is a political tactic to make it easier to swallow something much worse that is coming.  So if everything one does will be met with criticism, it leads to the logical conclusion that criticism should be ignored, which is a dangerous place to be.

Part of the problem is the scale to which the country and the government have grown.  The old solutions just don't work as well at that order of magnitude.  Then there is the constantly increasing number of existing laws and regulations that have to be navigated.  And then there is the media, especially independent journalism and social networks, which allows a wider and faster spread of news and ideas than ever before.  This can be good, in that it prevents important things from being hidden from public view.  But it also is the mechanism that allows the "latte salute" to rise to the top of the stack, as an emerging important national issue that we should all be aware of.