President Obama is catching flak for saluting his Marine guards with a coffee cup in his hand. Okay, granted, it was a lousy visual by a president who should know better than to give the media and his political enemies a PR gaffe like this. But let’s not pretend he’s the only president to bungle a presidential salute.
Let’s start with this: What is a presidential salute?
There was no such thing until Reagan invented it out of thin air. Most presidents never saluted the troops. Lincoln didn’t, nor Grant, nor the Roosevelts, nor Eisenhower; even though Grant and Eisenhower were former generals and Colonel Roosevelt earned his chops as a war hero. Nobody did it until Reagan came along and dreamed up the idea as a stunt to impress journalists. The media and public loved it, so he kept doing it, despite being told by his military advisers that, in military protocol terms, it’s inappropriate for presidents to salute troops because (a) they’re civilians and (b) aren’t in uniform. And so did all his successors.
It goes without saying that if you do something, you should strive to do it well, even if doing it is optional. Saluting doesn’t come naturally to most people. Military recruits don’t salute well at first, and neither do new presidents. It requires practice. But after several years in office, a president is expected to get it down pat, or at least not make a total hash of it. Nowadays, some people even consider it part of the job description, although it really isn’t.
But the argument floated by Obama’s critics, who at bottom are merely looking for any excuse to snipe at him, that an imperfect presidential salute is “unpatriotic” or “disrespectful” is fundamentally ridiculous. A bad salute is simply a bad salute; it doesn’t imply anything. In the military, a bad salute gets you chewed out by a superior, and that’s the end of it. In Republican La-La-Land, though, it unleashes a barrage of hypocritical bloviation reminiscent of a Great War artillery bombardment in its duration and intensity. But only when the black guy with Kenyan ancestors is the target of their criticism.
Yes, there’s big-time hypocrisy going on here. See 
photo. And that’s before you even ask the question, “What matters more, a botched presidential salute, or two bungled wars?”
As for the media, they’re the most complicit of all in this carnival sideshow. Why? Because their job is to report on the actual purpose of the President’s trip, which was not to practice saluting his Marine guards, but speaking to the U.N. about climate change, defeating ISIL, and other important issues. If reporters can’t find anything in this trip to write about other than a bad salute, then they’re not doing their jobs as journalists, and that’s far more damaging to the public interest than messing up a courtesy salute.