Obama Fails to Salute Marine | The Weekly Standard
To attempt to be fair to TWS, they are only reporting what CBS's Mark Knoller tweeted, but TWS obviously thinks it is newsworthy, too (no wonder you can't leave a comment there):
This stupidity has come up before.
In fact, there is no tradition of the commander in chief saluting uniformed armed forces personnel of any rank. As commander in chief, he doesn't have to, anyway (what part of "commander in chief" seems unclear?). Not even retired five-star general DD Eisenhower saluted military members when he was president, explaining on one occasion that saluting was a privilege of uniformed members only. President Truman, a combat veteran of World War One, did not salute for the same reason (and it's really quite impossible to imagine the patrician-minded FDR doing so).
The "tradition," such as it is, was started by Ronald Reagan.
John Kline, then Reagan’s military aide and now a Minnesota congressman, advised him that it went against military protocol for presidents to return salutes.If I were president I would not salute for the same reason as Eisenhower explained.
Kline said in a 2004 op-ed piece in The Hill that Reagan ultimately took up the issue with Gen. Robert Barrow, then commandant of the Marine Corps.
Barrow told Reagan that as commander in chief of the armed forces, he was entitled to offer a salute — or any sign of respect he wished — to anyone he wished, Kline wrote, adding he was glad for the change.
Update: Now even CNN and Politico have bandwagoned this non-event, but are reporting it as if it was meaningful. This says less about the president's courtesy than it does about another reason to believe that the Obama bubble is popping.
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