{"id":1200,"date":"2013-03-18T15:05:52","date_gmt":"2013-03-18T21:05:52","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/peaceeconomyproject.org\/wordpress\/?p=1200"},"modified":"2013-03-18T15:05:52","modified_gmt":"2013-03-18T21:05:52","slug":"white-house-tours-remain-the-only-sequestration-casualty-anyone-cares-about","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/peaceeconomyproject.org\/wordpress\/white-house-tours-remain-the-only-sequestration-casualty-anyone-cares-about\/","title":{"rendered":"White House Tours Remain The Only Sequestration Casualty Anyone Cares About"},"content":{"rendered":"

by Jason Linkins, Huffington Post
\nclick here for original article<\/a><\/p>\n

Life isn\u2019t easy. It\u2019s filled with many inconveniences. The train doesn\u2019t run on time. You shelled out a few hundred bucks to see a Broadway show and you got the understudy. There\u2019s raay-ayy-ayyn, on your wedding day. Bummer, dude. I feel for you.<\/p>\n

Of course, life is also filled with what I would call \u201cproblems.\u201d You get furloughed from your job at a time when money\u2019s tight. You lose the housing assistance that\u2019s helping keep you and your family in your apartment when you\u2019re unemployed. It\u2019s real pain that forces some harrowing choices.<\/p>\n

So, where on the inconvenience-to-problem spectrum would you put \u201ca bunch of White House tours have been canceled?\u201d Well, the media has decided it\u2019s the most dire crisis the country is facing, during this time of sequestration.<\/p>\n

The White House tours situation is the one-day story that ate the world. Aggrieved members of Congress, bereft of one of their go-to options to keep cronies and constituents happy, have inflamed the Beltway media into a cyclical bout of elite whinging. The White House press corps buffeted Jay Carney\u00a0with eight questions about the tours<\/a>\u00a0at his March 13 briefing.<\/p>\n

Keep in mind that all members of the White House press corps are ostensibly real-live human beings with free will and the tacit permission to ask Carney just about any question they want in the world. Also keep in mind that it\u2019s long been established that the reason the tours were canceled indefinitely is\u00a0because it\u2019s keeping the Secret Service from having to furlough more employees<\/a>\u00a0during sequestration than they would have otherwise been required to.<\/p>\n

In a perfect world, we could have a fully staffed Secret Service\u00a0and<\/em>\u00a0White House tours. But given the choice between making tourists in Washington participate in any one of thousands of alternative local attractions and entertainments, and furloughing the people who support the best security force in the history of the Western World, what would you choose to do? Surprisingly, the answer is somehow not as obvious to Beltway reporters as it should be.<\/p>\n

In a twist that I can only describe as deeply strange, the press has decided that pursuing the White House tours story is\u00a0something approaching journalistic heroism<\/a>. The galactically useless Washington Post editorial board says that the coverage of this piddling event in the lives of Beltway elites has\u00a0earned the White House a \u201cproper comeuppance\u201d for sequestration \u201chostage taking,\u201d<\/a>\u00a0the idea being that the shrewd reporters of Washington have seen through President Barack Obama\u2019s attempts to manufacture pain through automatic spending cuts and — by golly! — they are not falling for it.<\/p>\n

All of which would be really neat-o, if it weren\u2019t for the fact that sequestration is causing normal human Americans actual, tangible, life-altering pain. Beyond this cloistered Capitol Hill redoubt,\u00a0local news teams have picked up on these stories<\/a>. We have, ourselves,\u00a0endeavored to hand the reporters who cover the White House a litany of scoops<\/a>\u00a0about the effects sequestration is already having. If the goal here is simply to give the Obama administration a \u201ccomeuppance\u201d for \u201cbureaucratic hostage taking,\u201d then I daresay there\u2019s plenty of examples of furloughed employees and\u00a0airport closures<\/a>\u00a0and\u00a0canceled tuition assistance<\/a>\u00a0and\u00a0forestalled corruption trial work<\/a>\u00a0that will help in that effort. And unlike the White House tours story, coverage of these stories would actually have some measure of journalistic merit.<\/p>\n

The argument for covering the White House tours non-story in this all-in, claws-out approach is that it\u00a0catches the Obama administration out in a gamble<\/a>, that\u2019s now been ferreted out by Beltway reporters. And really, that\u2019s terrific. Bully for them. Gold stars all around. You guys found yourself a real live political stunt.<\/p>\n

But I\u2019ve got news for you guys! The sequestration itself is a political stunt. The super committee was a political stunt. The Simpson-Bowles commission was a political stunt. The round of debt ceiling hostage taking that put us on the path to the sequestration in the first place was a political stunt. Heck, the entire frenzy over deficit \u201cgrand bargaining\u201d at a time when we are experiencing mortal peril in the form of a massive unemployment crisis is, itself, a political stunt.<\/p>\n

And the hilarious thing about the cancellation of the White House tours is that maybe the gamble worked. I can\u2019t say whether it was an administration priority to engineer a sequestration-related inconvenience that would demonstrate that the hopelessly cosseted Washington media was incapable of evincing any concern beyond the purely parochial. But if that\u00a0was<\/em>\u00a0the intention, then mission accomplished.<\/p>\n

If there\u2019s good news, it\u2019s that your Congresscritters, having gotten what mileage they can out of the White House tours story,\u00a0have now taken to NIMBY-ish whinging<\/a>about how the sequestration is affecting life in their districts, and the trajectory of the story is finally headed into the world of real problems. Perhaps the White House press corps will now graduate to adult concerns, like the thousands of hard-working Americans who will lose their housing assistance.<\/p>\n

But fulsome coverage of White House tours is perhaps the best you can expect from these tourists.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

by Jason Linkins, Huffington Post click here for original article Life isn\u2019t easy. It\u2019s filled with many inconveniences. The train doesn\u2019t run on time. You shelled out a few hundred bucks to see a Broadway show and you got the understudy. There\u2019s raay-ayy-ayyn, on your wedding day. Bummer, dude. I feel for you. Of course, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":1201,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"nf_dc_page":"","om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[8],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1200","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-news"],"acf":[],"aioseo_notices":[],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/peaceeconomyproject.org\/wordpress\/wp-content\/uploads\/2013\/03\/s-WHITE-HOUSE-TOURS-large.jpg?fit=260%2C190&ssl=1","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/peaceeconomyproject.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1200","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/peaceeconomyproject.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/peaceeconomyproject.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/peaceeconomyproject.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/peaceeconomyproject.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1200"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/peaceeconomyproject.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1200\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1203,"href":"https:\/\/peaceeconomyproject.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1200\/revisions\/1203"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/peaceeconomyproject.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1201"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/peaceeconomyproject.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1200"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/peaceeconomyproject.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1200"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/peaceeconomyproject.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1200"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}