There are very few things I can count on in this business.
This is one of them.
There are a lot of people in this country who really, truly, deeply dislike the president.
A lot of them simply disagree with his policies. Others don't like him for other reasons.
An anonymous gentleman who leaves me a voice mail overnight several times a week made it clear this morning of his disgust with the president.
He believes we should apologize for our endorsement of Obama, and wonders if we're embarrassed.
I will admit that his second term has been disappointing. I have serious concerns about what happened at Benghazi as well as that IRS debacle. But I'm not about to go where this gentleman immediately went.
He said he understood "the demographics," and that we had to endorse Obama because our readership is largely black. This is the kind of sentiment I deal with every day.
I fear that we have lost respect for the office of the president. There was a time when no matter what you thought of the person residing in the White House, he commanded a modicum of respect. Every time I bring up that matter these days, Republicans remind me of the way the media went after and often mocked George W. Bush. I didn't, I tried to be respectful, but a lot of people did not.
On Thursday the president was due to come to Delaware to make a pitch for increased transportation funding, using the closed I-495 bridge in Wilmington as a backdrop.
On his way, his motorcade made a slight detour. He stopped at a place I've been many times, The Charcoal Pit down on Route 202, for lunch.
I immediately cobbled together a story and posted it on our website, as well as Facebook and Twitter.
The reaction was about what you might expect. The story exploded. It didn't take long for the comments to go where all too much of what is talked about with Obama wind up.
Look, I'll be the first to admit that I raised an eyebrow that the president did not change his plans after hearing of the Ukraine jet disaster.
If you want to disagree with him on those grounds, I have no problem with that.
But as usual, this kind of stuff went way beyond that, and simply devolved into name-calling and worse.
This is the world we live in.
Then again, I suppose you could say that in a world where 295 people were just shot out of the sky, Israel was launching a ground incursion into Gaza, and Microsoft was laying off 18,000 people, why the hell do we care about where the president went for lunch?
Welcome to my world.
It is Friday, isn't it?
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