People say the meanest things about Our Glorious Lead, Oops I mean President Barack Obama. They accuse him of golfing too much and caring too little. Some have even suggested that he has checked out 2 ½ years before he’s supposed to relinquish the Presidency. Today he had a chance to change all that. A Malaysian Airliner was shot down over Ukrainian airspace and it is more than just possible that Russia played a starring role in the carnage. 295 people are presumed dead. Twenty-three are Americans. This was as tough as President Obama was willing to get.

‘Before I begin, obviously the world is watching reports of a downed passenger jet near the Russia-Ukraine border. And it looks like it may be a terrible tragedy. Right now we’re working to determine whether there were American citizens on board. That is our first priority.’ ‘And I’ve directed my national security team to stay in close contact with the Ukrainian government. The United States will offer any assistance we can to help determine what happened and why. And as a country, our thoughts and prayers are with all the families and passengers, wherever they call home. (HT: Daily Mail)

To understand why this underwhelms, it helps to compare this brief interruption of his stump speech to how President Ronald Reagan reacted when a Korean airliner was shot down by the Soviet Union.

“This crime against humanity must never be forgotten,” Reagan began. He said he grieved for those who died in that attack and for the families of those they left behind. “Their deaths were the result of the Soviet Union violating every concept of human rights,” the president added. “Let me state as plainly as I can,” he continued, “there was absolutely no justification, either legal or moral, for what the Soviets did.”

The flags flew at ½ staff after this tragedy. Ronald Reagan had intelligence personnel finding out exactly how this was perpetrated. Barack Obama can read about what happened here. That assumes the busy man has time to. He hasn’t made any changes to his fundraiser schedule. It’s like these advisor people bugged him in the middle of lunch with this. The poor guy gets no rest. Yet if he still wants to try being a president, Ronald Reagan’s example of how to handle this would do Barack Obama a world of good.