The no-confidence vote from Clinton (who, as luck would have it, also will be on Martha’s Vineyard this week) comes as Obama is smarting from criticism by hawks that the current mess in Iraq might not have occurred if he had kept U.S. troops there. “That entire analysis is bogus and is wrong,” the president said Saturday. “But it gets frequently peddled around here by folks who oftentimes are trying to defend previous policies that they themselves made.”

It’s understandable that Obama would want to get away from it all, but for a president struggling to build support for his foreign policy, vacationing during a crisis is no day at the beach.

White House press secretary Josh Earnest reminded reporters Friday that Obama was traveling to the Vineyard “with an array of communications” and advisers. But when it came time for the president to speak, there was a 20-minute delay because the TV feed didn’t work, and when he finally spoke, the audio and video quality was poor.