Presidential travel smells of elitism

Against a scandalous backdrop of soaring oil prices and economic distress at the gas pump for America’s “great unwashed,” our president flies to Chicago on multiple occasions, most recently to tape the Oprah show.

Unbeknown to us, the huddled masses, each presidential flight into our nation’s second busiest airport causes scores of passenger aircraft inbound for O’Hare to consume tens of thousands of pounds of jet fuel in holding patterns as controllers dutifully clear and sterilize the airspace for Air Force One’s arrival.

Accompanying logistics aircraft, including the enormous C5A Galaxy, burn copious quantities of fuel hauling limousines, rotary-wing aircraft and support equipment.

Words such as clueless, feckless, smugly arrogant and utterly disconnected fall terribly short of describing this sort of White House hubris. Complicit, enabling, fawning and incompetent fail miserably to define a sycophant press corps loath to report these outrageous excesses.

With the founders’ vision seemingly hijacked by lesser men it falls to each of us to replace these elitist career politicians, regardless of party affiliation, with genuine statesmen patriots.

Tea party on, dudes; we’ve lots of work ahead of us.

William G. Parrot

McHenry