Where was Obama during Katrina? Trick question
Some questions are more satisfying than their answers -- if, that is, you care about facts.
One such question exploded across the internet into flight like a flock of angry birds in defense of President Donald Trump against back-seat critics of his response to Hurricane Harvey.
Among the defensive tweets, a deluge of "What about ...?" questions flooded the Twitter-sphere concerning a previous president -- which turned out to be the wrong previous president.
"How come we never saw Obama helping the Katrina victims?" read one typical tweet, reproduced on Snopes.com, the fact-checking website. "Oh, that's right. He was golfing at the time."
"THANK YOU, TRUMP," read another. "THIS IS HOW A REAL PRESIDENT LEADS. WHERE WAS OBAMA DURING KATRINA??? PROBABLY GOLFING. #MAGA." ("MAGA" is Trumpspeak for his embrace of Ronald Reagan's "Make America Great Again" slogan.)
And another: "U R a nutcase. It was your Pres Obama who was golfing during Hurricane Katrina. Pres Trump has been very proactive, B4 and now."
Don't you love to hear blockheads call you a "nutcase" as they spew idiotic falsehoods?
The Obama-golf meme, for example, will not die. For years Trump criticized Obama for allegedly golfing too much, in much the same way that Democrats criticized President Dwight Eisenhower in the 1950s, a decade that Trump often seems eager to recreate.
But CBS White House Correspondent Mark Knoller, a downright fanatical tracker of presidential golfing days, reported Trump has gotten off to a poor start. As of Aug. 1 in the first year of each man's presidency, Trump's golfing days outnumbered Obama's 21 to 11, Knoller reported. But, as Trump supporters say, it's early; give him a chance.
The argument that Obama did not do enough when Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans might make more sense if Obama had been president at the time. As many of us remember, George W. Bush was president when Katrina made landfall in August 2005. Obama was still representing Illinois in the U.S. Senate.
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