Decency And Indecency

Decency:

Barack Obama decides that it wouldn’t be appropriate for him to visit the US military bases in Rammstein and Landstuhl, Germany, as part of a campaign-funded trip as opposed to a CODEC mission:

Obama senior adviser Robert Gibbs told us in a statement, “During his trip as part of the CODEL to Afghanistan and Iraq, Senator Obama visited the combat support hospital in the Green Zone in Baghdad and had a number of other visits with the troops. For the second part of his trip, the senator wanted to visit the men and women at Landstuhl Regional Medical Center to express his gratitude for their service and sacrifice. The senator decided out of respect for these servicemen and women that it would be inappropriate to make a stop to visit troops at a U.S. military facility as part of a trip funded by the campaign.”

Indecency:

Just as he moved to pressure Angela Merkel into keeping Obama away from the Brandenberg Gate, Bush had his flunkies ban US State Department employees from witnessing Obama’s speech:

Under the pretense that he is maintaining political neutrality, the Washington Post reported today, State Department Undersecretary for Management Patrick F. Kennedy has interpreted the Foreign Affairs Manual in the most restrictive way, claiming that he is ensuring that foreign service officials will remain untainted by a “partisan political act.” (Spouse and family members, however, have generously been excluded from this ruling.) The U.S. embassy, which is headed by ambassador Robert Timken, a businessman and crony of George W. Bush’s from Ohio, who is widely reviled in Germany for his ignorance of foreign affairs, has instructed officials not to attend the rally. The American Foreign Service Association has complained about the edict but there’s not enough time to dispute it. Funny that.

Somehow I doubt that any State Department personnel will ever be barred by Bush Junta appointees from attending a John McCain speech.

UPDATE: Guess what — it was the Pentagon that, under orders from John McCain, reclassified Obama’s planned Rammstein and Landstuhl visits as beyond the pale, even though they’d cleared the visits earlier, and allowed McCain to make similar visits.