Did you hear how the poor villagers in DC are just like the innocent na'vi, and they have been bombed into oblivion by the Obama Administration because they are working too hard and won't party with Sally Quinn? It's true. She just told us.
When Obama was elected, people began singing "Happy Days Are Here Again." Expectations were over the top. It would be only hours before we would all be dancing on tables. They were beautiful and glamorous, hip and fun. They were the new Kennedys, and Washington would come alive again. They would set a new social tone. Young people would be out every night, partying, mixing and mingling. Members of Congress, who had been sleeping on sofas in their offices and in group houses because their families lived back in the home districts, would start accepting invitations again instead of working for 18 hours, three days a week, and then going home for four.
It was all a Camelot fantasy. Obama inherited the helm of the Titanic. Many of those he brought in were from past administrations. A lot of his crowd came in from Chicago and stuck together. People are working around the clock, and too exhausted and overextended to go out. The Obamas rarely entertain, except for large events.
You see, in Sally Quinn's world, the American people elected Obama so that he and his crew would party with Sally Quinn, but they didn't! They decided to work instead, and she won't have it! All those young men, and poor Sally Quinn isn't getting asked out by any of them! And since they don't, it's JUST like those corporate mercenaries destroying the Na'vi home tree.
I've had people ask me if the "cocktail party circuit" actually exists, and of course it does. No one could parody that entitled crowd more than Quinn has just done so. Unfortunately, Quinn is not alone, as Media Matter's Jamison Foser notes:
Hard as it may be to imagine, Quinn is not alone among establishment media in heaping abuse on presidents who don't make sucking up to her a priority -- particularly Democratic presidents. Just a few weeks ago, Time's Mark Halperin wrote that a key Obama shortcoming was his purported difficulty "Wooing Official Washington" -- by which Halperin meant himself and his friends. Or, as he put it: "Beltway salons and newsrooms whose denizens hoped the über-cool newbies would play." At the time, I noted that "this is the kind of idiocy that contributed to the elite media's hatred of the Clintons," and that there were other signs of Village restlessness -- particularly, Sally Quinn's call for the resignation of the White House social secretary, whose sins include the fact that she is "not of Washington."
Quinn's column may be absurd and shallow and betray a fundamental lack of seriousness, but it is not entirely wrong. Much of the Beltway media establishment really will trash a president for purely social reasons.
Keep that in mind: Their priorities are not your priorities. They care very little about jobs and health care and climate change. They just want to bask in the reflected glory that comes from dancing on tabletops with the "beautiful and glamorous, hip and fun." And if they can't, there will be hell to pay.