A whole lot of media outlets should be ashamed of themselves for pulling that story about Barack Obama's daughter Published: Tuesday, March 20, 2012, 8:40 PM Updated: Wednesday, March 21, 2012, 12:54 PM

A whole lot of media outlets should be ashamed of themselves for pulling that story about Barack Obama's daughter

Published: Tuesday, March 20, 2012, 8:40 PM     Updated: Wednesday, March 21, 2012, 12:54 PM

 By Paul Mulshine/The Star Ledger 

Barack Obama with daughter Malia

If Barack Obama wants to send his daughter to Oaxaca, that's fine with me.

Just don't let her take the $12 DC-3 flight over the mountains to Puerto Escondido.

I did that back in 1983 when I was taking a rather long hiatus from my career as an inkstained wretch.

I had nice flight over to Oaxaca from Puerto Escondido, where I was staying to enjoy the waves at the so-called  Mexican Pipeline.

And I had a nice stay in the city, which is old and gracious - unlike Mexico City which is a lot newer and somewhat grace-free.

The flight back was an adventure, though.

 My fears were first aroused when I saw a truck pull up to the 50-year-old airplane on the runway. A guy got out with a big can of oil and just started pouring it wholesale into one engine.

By the time we got up into the air, everything was socked in. The entire flight is over a rugged mountain range, so if that engine gave out I knew we were in for a fun landing.

The cockpit door would swing open and I could see the pilot struggling with the wheel. An old Mexican lady in the first row had her rosary beads out and was praying up a storm.

I wondered how the pilot would ever find the small airstrip along the coast. I remember taking solace in the thought that if this plane hadn't crashed in half a century, odds were it wasn't going to crash that day.

I was right. We landed without incident and before long I was back at the beach with a cold beer in my hand.

That's a long way of saying that there are lots of dangerous things to do in Mexico, but traveling around a pleasant city guarded by 25 Secret Service men is not among them.

So when the White House prevailed on the media to pull those stories about Malia's school trip, any self-respecting journalist would have told them to shove that request right up their collectiveculos.

Instead, a lot of media outlets acquiesced, says Politico:

On Monday, the AFP reported that Obama's daughter was on a school trip along with a number of friends and 25 Secret Service agents. The story was picked up by Yahoo, the Huffington Post, and the International Business Times, as well as UK publications like the Daily Mail and the Telegraph and other overseas publications like The Australian.

But on Monday night, the story had been removed from those sites.

These guys should be ashamed of themselves. That was a legit story, and I'll tell you why:

Barack Obama leads a political party that has as its core tenet a belief that the great majority of African-American kids should be trapped in lousy public schools with no hope of escape unless their parents hit the lottery.

And then our first black president ships his precious daughters off to a private school where the kids are so rich they can spend spring break touring the ruins in Mexico?

 I toured Monte Alban, the old Aztec city up in the hills above Oaxaca. It gave me quite a sense of history, as it would for all those other, poorer black kids who don't get to go on trips like Obama's daughters.

If I had my druthers, those other kids would have the option of going to private schools. If you gave  the typical black family in D.C. an amount equal to public-school tuition, I'm sure the parents could find a Catholic school that would teach the kids with enough money left over for the kids to make educational trips on spring break.

I'm for giving those kids that choice.

Obama isn't.

As another president said, if you can't take the heat, get out of la cocina.

ON THE OTHER HAND: Rick Santorum once again proved himself a pendejo by objecting to the trip on the grounds that there is a travel advisory out for Mexico. As this article notes, there is no advisory out for the lovely little state of Oaxaca. It is just plain stupid to assume that because there is violence in one part of Mexico the entire country should be off limits.  I've been all over Mexico and Central America, and I never once went to a place quite as dangerous as some of our cities right here in Jersey.

Should Kansas be off-limits because Camden is dicey? Only a moron would believe that. Santorum is that moron.