Obama's Blacked Out Vacation Inspires Shrugs From Howard Kurtz While Bush's Blacked Out Baghdad Trip An Outrage

'There is the small but inconvenient fact that the White House lied to the press,' said Howard Kurtz. No, he was not talking about any infraction committed by the Barack Obama's administration, nor was he discussing the President George W. Bush's oft-maligned justification for the war in Iraq. No, Kurtz was expressing his dismay that President Bush would obscure from the press his plans to visit the troops serving in Baghdad on Thanksgiving in 2003. On Monday, however, with the White House press corps expressing frustration that Obama has sequestered himself during his trip to Florida for golfing lessons with Tiger Woods, Kurtz advised the press to 'give the guy a break.'

RELATED: Howard Kurtz Trashes The Press for Frustration Over Access To Vacationing Obama: 'Give The Guy A Break'

'A lot of the journalists I've talked to today are upset that this kind of deception was engaged in, not for military secrecy ' although clearly there was a security aspect ' but to set up this grand turkey photo-op for the president,' Kurtz said admonishing President Bush on a CNN panel in 2003.

Apparently, Kurtz is selective about which of the press corps outrages he finds legitimate. His advice to the press corps in 2013 when being shut out by the White House is to accept that Obama's on vacation and back off. 'It's not him, it's you,' Kurtz wrote.

Kurtz's esteem for the operational necessity of keeping a president's trip to an active warzone a secret has evolved in the years that followed the Iraq war. In May, 2012, when Obama took a stealth trip to Afghanistan, Kurtz regarded it as a deft maneuver that ran rings around his Republican opponent, Mitt Romney.

In that piece, Kurtz recalled how Bush's 2003 expedition to Baghdad 'dominated the news for a couple of days,' though he made no mention of how he had scolded Bush for his administration's pre-trip mendacity with the press.

All that Kurtz observed about Obama's trip to Afghanistan was that the 44th President of the United States had scored a powerful symbolic victory which Romney could not match.

'[T]he image of the president who got Osama, surrounded by cheering soldiers in the country where the terrorist plotted the 9/11 attacks, is a statement in and of itself,' Kurtz wrote. 'Despite the leak, Obama's meticulously planned visit dramatically drove home the demise of bin Laden'and on that score, at least, it was mission accomplished.'

Apparently the advance of the calendar, and the changing of the guard in the White House, has a way of refining one's opinion about the necessity of transparent presidency.

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