THREE MARTINI LUNCH: JANUARY 12, 2015

National Review's Jim Geraghty and host Greg Corombos discuss current events. Today's topics: The Obama administration sends no top official to the big Paris march - and the mainstream media calls them on it - and revelations about Ben Carson's connection to an embattled Texas supplement maker.



The media excoriates Obama for skipping pro-free speech Paris march

Organizers in France estimated that upwards of 3.7 million people attended a Sunday unity rally in Paris in response to the attack on the satirical weekly Charlie Hebdo. Among those marchers were a variety of world leaders, but President Barack Obama was not among them. Nor did the president send any ranking administration officials to represent the United States. Not even Attorney General Eric Holder, who was in Paris at the request of French authorities, attended the march. The United States was utterly absent from this global event.

Obama did not even bother to attend a solidarity march for Paris that was held in Washington D.C. yesterday despite the participation of American officials like the State Department's Victoria Nuland. "Obama wasn't far from the march in D.C. on Sunday that wended silently along six blocks from the Newseum to the National Law Enforcement Officers Memorial," Politico reported. "Instead, he spent the chilly afternoon a few blocks away at the White House, with no public schedule, no outings."

For this decision, the president is enduring a deluge of criticism from both the left and the right, as well as from the nonpartisan press. Americans in general have been humiliated by their country's absence during this historic display of support for free expression.

"Sadly, I can't help but view this as a painful point of national embarrassment and a failure to play our part on the world stage - and I say that as one who has never before accused President Obama of embarrassing the nation he leads," wrote outspoken liberal columnist Rick Ungar in Forbes.

"I say this as an American - not as a journalist, not as a representative of CNN - but as an American: I was ashamed," CNN anchor Jake Tapper wrote.

"You let the world down," read the front page of the New York Daily News on Monday.

Even the often staid and demure participants on CNN's politics panel on the morning show New Day were animated over the absence of America from this pivotal symbolic event...

Also read:

State Dept. Stumbles for Six Minutes Trying to Explain Paris No-Show By U.S. Officials

White House Unsure What Obama Was Doing During Paris Rally