American royalty on parade

Here’s another pure Bookworm post that got published first at Mr. Conservative:

Biden's London stay

Imagine that you’re the vice president of a nation that’s slowly going bankrupt. Your president has been traveling around the nation saying that, with the economy poised so delicately on the verge of disaster, any spending cuts will destroy elder care, education, and the military, to name just a few groups that the president says will suffer if any cuts are made to America’s spending patterns.

Now imagine that you, as vice president, travel for one night to London. How many people should you take with you and where should you stay? You, being a sensible person, take a bare-bones entourage and stay at a sturdy, middle-of-the-road hotel that can cope with your security needs.

But you’re not the vice president — Joe Biden is. And despite President Obama’s Chicken Little “Sky is Falling” shtick about an economy so delicate that even minor spending cuts will destroy it, nothing is too good for you. That’s why, if you’re Vice President Joe Biden spending a bit of time in London, you require 136 rooms at the Hyatt Regency for your team, resulting in a total of 893 room nights for the stay. Oh, and you charge the American people $459,338.65 – or a little more than $500 per room for these public servants.

Biden's Paris stay

Then, if you’re a member of the Obama administration, you do the same thing all over again in Paris. This time you stay at the Hotel Intercontinental Paris Le Grand. You bring the full entourage and end up costing the taxpayers $585,000.50. After all, nothing is too good for public employees in the Obama administration.

Even the fact that these hotel contracts are not open for competitive bidding for security reasons does not justify these expenses. It’s time for people in Washington to remember that we’re not their employees. The opposite is true – they work for us.