Fox News Goes After Obama's Sandals

To be a regular viewer of Fox & Friends is to have your expectations lowered every day. Owing either to incurable optimism or terminal naïveté, each morning after I click it off I find myself thinking: “Well, there's no way they can possibly get any dumber than that.”

I've never been proven right.

This morning the trio of Brian Kilmeade, Steve Doocy, and Gretchen Carlson devoted two segments -- two whole segments -- to the New York Post's question of whether it was appropriate for Barack Obama, as the President of the United States, to wear flip-flops while on vacation.

With the chyron “Dressed To Un-Impress: Critics Take On Vacation Attire” beneath them, the three seemed to agree that it doesn't matter what the president wears on vacation. Carlson even commented: “It doesn't bother me at all. Nothing does. If he would have had on a full snowmobile suit, it would have been fine with me, too. As long as you're enacting policies that the American people want, who cares what you wear?”

OK... So why report on it to begin with? Because it's a mindless cheap shot at Obama and it plays to the Fox News audience, which is always hungry for reasons to dislike the Democratic president. That's why, despite their unanimous agreement that the story was completely unimportant, Fox & Friends returned to it a couple of hours later.

And as for Carlson's claim that she doesn't care what the president wears, she wasn't so apathetic last June, when she blasted Obama for wearing “fancy pants and a fancy shirt” while touring the oil-covered Gulf coast beaches, because “80 percent of public perception is image, not what you say.”

But, again, if you think this is insurmountably asinine, just wait until tomorrow.