Criticism of the Royal Family will not be tolerated

John Hayward:

Great news!  Our long national Elizabeth Lauten nightmare is over.  She’s out of a job, after tendering the sort of “resignations” that would usually be accompanied by an expressed desire to spend more time with her family.  Don’t you feel better now?

Who’s Elizabeth Lauten, you ask?  You must not have been following the mainstream media over the weekend, because they thought she was a very big deal.  Until now, she was the comms director for Rep. Stephen Fincher (R-TN).  Don’t you dare ask, “Who’s Stephen Fincher?”  I just told you.  It’s right there in between the parentheses.  The “R” is the most significant of the three letters contained therein.

Here’s the story of Lauten’s brief and unhappy moment in the national spotlight, as related by CNN – the network that still employs an anchor who giggled with glee over the tape of Sarah Palin’s daughter reporting her assault to a police officer, pronouncing it the most entertaining audio her network ever aired:

[Lauten] faced heavy backlash when she wrote a Thanksgiving-Day screed against the Obama daughters, as well as the President and first lady, on Facebook that quickly went viral across the web. In it, she scolded Malia and Sasha Obama, 16 and 13 years old, respectively, for what she said was their inappropriate outfits and their bored looks during Wednesday’s turkey pardoning ceremony, which they attended alongside their father.

“Dear Sasha and Malia: I get you’re both in those awful teen years, but you’re a part of the First Family, try showing a little class. At least respect the part you play,” Lauten wrote in the post.

“Then again, your mother and father don’t respect their positions very much, or the nation for that matter,” she added. “So I’m guessing you’re coming up a little short in the ‘good role model’ department.”

Lauten went on to tell them to “stretch yourself…rise to the occasion” and “act like being in the White House matters to you.”

“Dress like you deserve respect, not a spot at a bar. And certainly don’t make faces during televised, public events,” she concluded.

I don’t pay much attention to the annual turkey pardon, under Presidents of either party, but I gather a lot of people disagreed with this characterization of the Obama daughters’ dress and deportment.  Which is fine, but somehow disagreement turned into destruction with lightning speed, resulting in a wildly disproportionate level of coverage – it was the lead story on some news programs this morning!

When Jonathan Gruber, the architect of ObamaCare, was caught on tape admitting to the massive fraud necessary to shove the program through Congress, it was scarcely treated as news by Big Media (although Jake Tapper at CNN was a notable exception.)  When President Obama straight-up lied to the American people about his association with Gruber, the media yawned and relayed the lies with little objection or criticism, essentially taking the attitude that it was a non-story because everyone knew Obama was lying out of obvious political necessity.

But a staffer for a Republican member of Congress says something critical of the Royal Family, and look out – it’s an instant four-alarm fire, complete with an Internet flash mob – the laziest form of pressure ever invented – and a head swiftly rolls.  Lauten was gone in a fraction of the time it took to cashier VA Secretary Eric Shinseki after the worst scandal ever, in a messy department where that’s a fairly high bar to clear, despite a far louder outcry from more serious people than the insta-critics that took Lauten down over a Facebook post.  And it wasn’t an inherently outrageous or profane post, either.

I can’t tell if the official Big Media action line is that she deserved instant career electrocution for daring to say something critical of the Obama daughters, or because of that crack about how Mr. and Mrs. Obama “don’t respect their positions very much or the nation for that matter.”  Something tells me the latter probably stuck in a lot of craws more than the former, but the old Beltway chestnut about how presidential children are totally off-limits is a sturdier excuse for putting someone on the unemployment lines..  (If you can remember how the media didn’t seem entirely devoted to that principle during the latter Bush years, your memory is too long.)  The President and his staff routinely describe their political opponents in far harsher terms than Lauten’s crack about the Obamas disrespecting their positions; in fact, we’re in the midst of an immigration argument in which Obama’s adversaries are depicted as racist xenophobes.

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