No he is not an officer in the military, just like the secretary of navy and the secretary if defense were not officers in my chain of command but they were in it.
His track record with veterans and serviceembers is a self fulfilling prophecy held by vets and service members. Majority of us hated him before he was inaugurated.
I bet this news story is highly important to the ISIS victims and ebola stricken countries in Africa. I'm waiting for their reaction.
I'm glad the president is making decisions with the benefit of caffeine...and I think getting worked up about a salute is more than a bit much. This is the United States, not the Klingon Empire.
Maybe as Commander-In-Chief he added the coffee salute to the list official salute responses by the President. I think that's within his power.
He has saluted correctly before, so it's definitely not an issue of him knowing how to do it. The question you brought up is whether or not presidents should salute in the first place, especially presidents from a non-military background. I believe Reagan began the modern precedent of returning a salute after being told by Marine Corps Commandant Gen. Robert Barrow that as commander in chief, he could salute whomever he wanted. President Obama's comparatively lower approval rating among the military and their families exacerbates the issue: it looks to them like he's ignoring tradition, even though the mentioned "tradition" is rather ambivalent in reality. Here's an excerpt from a New York Times Op-Ed: "My ambivalence [on whether or not the president should return salutes] came to an end last week, when I saw a videotape of the president’s midnight trip to Dover Air Force Base in Delaware, where he had participated, very early that morning, in the “dignified transfer” of 15 Army soldiers and three Drug Enforcement Administration agents killed that week in Afghanistan. Mr. Obama stood ramrod straight and saluted as six soldiers carried the coffin bearing the body of Sgt. Dale Griffin of Indiana off a C-17 transport aircraft and into a waiting van. His salute, it struck me, was impeccable in every way." Source: Carey Winfrey, http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/01/opinion/01winfrey.html
As soon as we saw it my wife and I thought it was a typical issue to get the Fox/ Rush gang all worked up.
What's disrespectful is Americans with personal bias and agendas taking every opportunity to slander their own President.
it was on the official WH instagram feed. didn't anyone in the west wing look at it and say, "eh, let's not share this one with the world."
