Opinion: No Obama apology but Las Vegas gets a White House clarification
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Last month the normally shy and retiring Las Vegas Mayor Oscar Goodman got all hot and bothered because the rookie president of the United States made a perfectly reasonable declaration that public bailout moneys ought not be spent by banks and others on wild corporate times in places like Las Vegas, which apparently some people see as a wild and crazy place.
Go figure!
Goodman hopelessly demanded an apology and a presidential retraction for the benefit of nearby cameras because he said he thought singling out a neon city that has not quite yet legalized prostitution would hurt his tourism business.
Not because of the prostitution possibility. But because fewer people might come.
And The Ticket, in explaining the controversy in a shot glass, took the occasion to show an interesting photograph of His Honor conferring with two presumed aides clad in large feathers.
And that photo is still available here for feather fanciers, btw.
Well, no apology from the White House, of course. But Goodman and his fine city packed with upstanding civic club members mainly from other cities got an unnecessary clarification today. In answer to a question about alleged concerns among some tourism officials, White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs said:
If you’ve got the desire and the wherewithal to travel to any of those places, to quote a famous Southerner, Lewis Grizzard said, ‘Delta is ready when you are.’ What the president expressed some concern about was companies that are getting large amounts of public funding, taxpayer funding, through a financial stabilization plan, that the president does have great concern with public money being used for that. But the president believes it’s important to have a strong tourism industry and that it’s important that, as the president said earlier, that the -- or late last week, that we shouldn’t retrench or pull back from; that he would encourage people to travel. His concern -- the concern that he specifically expressed had to do with the use of taxpayer -- or the use of money by institutions that have received a lot of assistance from the taxpayers. Obviously that’s not something that he would think appropriate.
-- Andrew Malcolm
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