While the usual suspects want to make apologies for him – and of course, immediately blame President Bush – this has hit a nerve. If we were still under a traditional liberal media monopoly, this might have been swept under the rug. But in the age of social media, this short clip has taken on a life of its own, and the timing could not be worse for the president from a policy or political standpoint.

The reason this is so bad for President Obama is because he just broke the cardinal rule of not playing to his negative stereotypes. As I have written before, President Obama has a problem with the military and military culture. So to do something as belittling and insulting as this “latte salute” is not trivial; it suggests and reinforces something larger at a time when the president is expecting the military to take action, in part to compensate for his past failures.