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Obama criticized for doing the tango 2 days after bombing in Brussels"
President Obama and first lady Michelle Obama were coaxed from their table at a state dinner in Argentina on Wednesday night to dance the tango. And critics already furious that the president had attended a baseball game in Cuba following Tuesday’s deadly attacks in Brussels were unmoved.
“That was a tremendous mistake,” Richard Haass, president of the Council on Foreign Relations, said on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe” on Thursday. “It’s fine to go to Argentina, you want to do the work, but you’ve got to be careful of these little photo ops and optics. Baseball games and tangos, that’s inconsistent with the seriousness of the day."
From Cuba:
Obama praised the way David Ortiz responded to terrorism in 2013.
“One of my most powerful memories and one of my proudest moments as president was watching Boston respond after the marathon, and when Ortiz went out and said, probably the only time that America didn’t have a problem with somebody cursing on live TV, was when he talked about Boston and how strong it was and that it was not going to be intimidated,” Obama said in an ESPN interview during the game.
“And that is the kind of resilience and the kind of strength that we have to continually show in the face of these terrorists.”
That is not the whole story, however, as Taranto points out in his
Best of the Web column today, quoting from CNN...
“Boston and surrounding communities are put on lockdown—with schools closed, public transit halted and people ordered off the streets—as authorities hunt for the surviving suspect.” That was four days after the attack.
