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Not to Nag But Obama’s Horse Flip Flop Leaves Media Uninterested

-By Warner Todd Huston

Let’s talk about flip flops, shall we? No not those of GOP presidential candidate Mitt Romney, but those of President Obama. One in particular, in fact. It turns out that Obama was horsing around with one of his many campaign promises and has ended up galloping in the opposite direction of the thing. And throughout this whole episode the Old Media has gone silent.

What we talking about is Obama’s 180 turn on his promise to make a ban on American horse slaughter houses permanent. And no less than the Barbi Twins of Hugh Heffner fame find this story a night-mare and are a bit peeved at their Big “O” over the whole thing.

A few media outlets did mention the controversy over the reopening of American horse slaughter houses that Obama signed into law in September — The Washington Times and Politico, for instance — but here it is almost two months later and few others have paid much mind to the incident that sent Barbi One and Two into a snit over the President.

The ban on horse slaughter houses occurred by a do-gooder Congress in 2006 forcing American horse owners to ship their horses to Canada or Mexico to have them butchered. These horse-loving congressional buttinskis imagined that they were being “humane” — the last refuge of PETA scoundrels everywhere — when they instituted the ban on such abattoirs. The ban was meant to end the trade in horse meat for human consumption, as well. Horse lovers thought they were being nice to the poor horsies in America, you see?

Unfortunately for Congress, horses in America ended up experiencing even more pain and suffering as a result of the ban. It turned out that in this horrid Obama economy owners that lost their ability to continue paying for their horse’s upkeep and those that could not afford to take old and infirm horses all the way to Canada or Mexico to have them put down humanely began to just leave them out in the wild where the horses either starved to death or were attacked by wild dogs and coyotes and ripped to shreds. Real humane, eh?

There were other unintended consequences, too. s the Washington Times reported:

A June report by the Government Accountability Office, Congress‘ chief investigative branch, said the ban depressed prices for horses in the U.S. and led to a surge in reports of neglect or abuse as owners of older horses had no way of disposing of them, short of selling them to “foreign slaughtering facilities where U.S. humane slaughtering protections do not apply.”

The ban was lifted when Obama signed a recent appropriations bill to which the ban-lifting language was attached. This violated Obama’s promise to keep the ban in place, much to the dismay of the aforementioned Barbi Twins.

But one really can’t blame the Twins for being a bit miffed. After all, in 2007 Obama bragged to the Humane Society that he was a big supporter of the slaughter house ban and intended to keep it that way. It’s no wonder the twins feel like their tails had been bobbed.

Now, while the Barbi Twins have taken to their Twitter account to lambaste the President for his broken promise, the rest of the Old Media establishment have pretty much ignored the story. As Noel Sheppard notes, “imagine the media’s outrage if George W. Bush had gone back on such a humane promise.”

Imagine, indeed. Apparently wild horses couldn’t drag the media kicking and screaming to this story.

I wrote about this whole thing myself way back in June and I followed up early in December and the latter piece earned me a few sharply worded Barbi Tweets. But, I guess I shouldn’t be too mad at them. After all, their tweets are probably the closest I’ll ever get to a pair of Playboy Playmates!
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“The only end of writing is to enable the reader better to enjoy life, or better to endure it.”
–Samuel Johnson

Warner Todd Huston is a Chicago based freelance writer. He has been writing opinion editorials and social criticism since early 2001 and before that he wrote articles on U.S. history for several small American magazines. His political columns are featured on many websites such as Andrew Breitbart’s BigGovernment.com, BigHollywood.com, and BigJournalism.com, as well as RightWingNews.com, RightPundits.com, CanadaFreePress.com, StoptheACLU.com, AmericanDaily.com, among many, many others. Mr. Huston is also endlessly amused that one of his articles formed the basis of an article in Germany’s Der Spiegel Magazine in 2008.

For a full bio, please CLICK HERE.