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It’s astonishing to have the President of the United States...stand up there and publicly castigate an entire industry...I don’t think I could even imagine such a thing as recently as a few years ago.

Are you serious? Are you unable to go back in history to just the previous administration and remember Obama's gutting of the coal industry, and his refusal to allow a much-needed pipeline to be built? Going further back, how about Eisenhower's famous condemnation of the "military-industrial complex?" Presidents have fairly routinely slammed industries with which they have issues. The banking sector, energy sector, auto and medical insurance, tobacco and more have been excoriated by presidents and members of Congress throughout our history.

Those are all valid points, but coal mining, oil/gas extraction, the "military industrial complex," commercial banking, etc. aren't industries that market directly to mass-market customers. If it weren't for the people employed in those industries, nobody in the political world would even care what any public official said about them. It's not as if your average American sits down and really cares about (or even knows) whether his home is powered by electricity from a coal-fired power plant, a hydroelectric generating station, a nuclear power plant, etc.

This is a very different situation entirely. As I pointed out yesterday, this is the equivalent of the President of the United States standing up in public and telling Americans that McDonalds hamburgers taste like sh!t ... and they should go somewhere else for their fast food. I don't think this has ever happened before -- at least not in my lifetime.