Everyone from Jon Stewart to Ted Cruz has mocked President Obama for not flying to France last weekend.
And rightly so.
It should have been a no-brainer for any American president to want to be seen by the whole world leading a massive unity march against terrorism in response to what is being called France’s 9/11.
Obama had a great chance to show America’s solidarity with the latest victims of Islamist extremism and stand up for a fundamental Western value like free speech.
But he blew it.
Many of Obama’s most faithful allies are still shocked by his clumsy blunder and have trouble defending him. But his latest diplomatic faux pas doesn’t surprise me a bit.
The leader of what we used to call the Free World has been embarrassing the USA on the world stage for years by not going where he should go - or saying and doing things he shouldn’t when he does go somewhere.
Let’s see.
If memory serves, he didn’t go to Berlin in 2009 for the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Wall or to Poland for celebrations of the collapse of Moscow’s evil empire.
And though he didn’t skip the 70th anniversary of D-Day last year in Normandy, he spent most of his time during the solemn ceremony chomping on bubble gum like a 12 year old. The French people were irate at the disrespect.
It’s not that Monsieur Obama dislikes France.
He also stopped in France in 2009 on what became known as his first “Apology Tour,” where he apologized for America’s past “bad” behavior, including being arrogant toward Europe, using the atomic bomb in World War II and trying to unseat communist dictators in Latin American.
Meanwhile, the president has found plenty of time to visit other parts of Western Europe when it suited his political or publicity purposes.
Remember when he went all the way to Copenhagen just to lobby for Chicago to be chosen to host the 2016 Olympics?
What happened spontaneously in Paris last weekend was bigger and more important for a president of the USA to attend than all those official, long-planned events.
A million and a half Parisians went into the streets to defy the Islamic terrorists who cold-blooded slaughtered journalists solely because they had satirized Muhammad.
The whole world watched a morality play. And our president - and therefore our country and our Western values - was MIA.
We’ll never know the real reason Obama didn’t fly to Paris unless he confesses it in his memoirs.
But he’s been known to blame America for just about everything.
Maybe in the back of his mind he thinks the terror attack on Charlie Hebdo was the fault of the cartoonists who made fun of Mohammad after they were warned not to.
Maybe he thinks it was somehow America’s fault. Or Christianity’s fault.
But it doesn’t really matter what Obama thinks. He had no excuse to skip Paris.
The White House has admitted the president had nothing on his schedule Saturday or Sunday.
He had no pressing fund-raiser in West Hollywood to attend, no big golf match set for Sunday morning. Michelle wasn’t using Air Force One over the weekend.
So the president had plenty of time to fly to Paris. If he didn’t want to miss the NFL playoff games on TV, he could have dispatched Joe Biden, who spent the weekend at his home in Delaware, no doubt watching the same football games his boss did.
At the very least Obama could have ordered Attorney General Eric Holder - who was already in Paris - to march arm-in-arm with the 40-plus other world leaders who found the guts and the time to get there and make a public statement for freedom.
Instead, our president did nothing and America was embarrassed in front of the whole world.
Michael Reagan is the son of President Ronald Reagan, a political consultant, and the author of “The New Reagan Revolution” (St. Martin’s Press). He is the founder of the email service reagan.com and president of The Reagan Legacy Foundation. Visit his websites at www.reagan.com and www.michaelereagan.com. Send comments to Reagan@caglecartoons.com. Follow @reaganworld on Twitter