President Tin Ear

Note: I wrote the post below last night, put it up, took it down, and am now putting it up again, with the updates that I also wrote last night. Because the story kept getting scrubbed (see updates), I initially thought that maybe the disclosure of the vacation trip represented a mistake on the part of the White House communications people, and that perhaps this isn't the kind of thing one should draw attention to, for security purposes; after all, why else would everybody, including Drudge, be taking the piece down? However, the original story has now been swamped by one far more interesting: why did the story disappear so rapidly, without explanation, from so many different news outlets? And if security really is a concern, why would the Obamas let one of their children go to Mexico in the first place? Oaxaca is not one of the places subject to a State Department travel advisory, but still - it's MEXICO, dude! Possibly the story isn't true at all; at least one person noted that Malia's school doesn't let out for spring break until next week. But then why flush it, without explanation, down the memory hole rather than formally retract it?

President Obama has been consistently criticized for his family's frequent and expensive vacations in a time of considerable economic woe; to me, that's only mildly interesting. The employment of 25 Secret Service personnel for this trip, however, is, in my opinion, newsworthy - as is the scrubbing of the story from the web.

The President’s been banging the drum for exports lately, but in exporting one of his daughters to Mexico, he may have gone too far.

Barack Obama’s eldest daughter is spending her spring break in the historic Mexican city of Oaxaca in the company of 12 friends – and 25 Secret Service agents.

Maybe I’m behind the times, but it used to be that, when you talked about “students” and “spring break”, you’d be talking about college students (ok, maybe high school students, too). Since when do 13-year-olds go to Mexico on spring break? Perhaps more to the point, with a bad economy, high unemployment, an anemic recovery, trillion-dollar deficits, is it good optics for the president to send yet another member of his family on an expensive vacation? With 12 friends and 25 freakin’ Secret Service agents?

Oh, and I’m sure this is just one of those crazy things: this story was one of the lead items on Yahoo News earlier today, and when you clicked on the link, you got the story about Malia’s trip to Mexico; however, very shortly after the story appeared, when you clicked on the link, it took you to an absolutely un-newsworthy story about a singer in Senegal taking part in local (Senegalese) politics. Now the headline has disappeared altogether, and the story isn’t listed in the expanded list of today’s headlines.

Update: Here's another coincidence; the Huffington Post piece that I had originally linked has also vanished. The headline still comes up when you Google "Obama's daughter", but the link just leads to HP's home page.

Update II: The link in the main post above is to a post at Pat Dollard's blog; he provides a link to the original story in the Telegraph, and if you hit that link, you now get a 404.

Update III: Why, the whole thing is an internet phenomenon! The Tatler has more.

Update IV: The Daily Caller has picked up on both the vacation and the vigorous internet scrubbing.