No first lady could not have gotten away with such ostentatious vulgar spending this long especially during a major depression. Michelle Obama has been pushing her luck in a most insensitive manner for a year and a half. Not that Barack has been much better. Now the dam burst just in time for the midterm elections. Nancy Reagan was forced to sing "second hand rose" because she accepted a set of dishes for the White house as well as fancy cloths from her rich friends during a recession. What will Michelle have to do?

Material girl Michelle Obama is a modern-day Marie Antoinette on a glitzy Spanish vacation

Let us not forget the husband: L'Etat c'est moi!

Susan Estrich asks: Does Obama get the country's current situation?

I'm from Massachusetts. I was in my 30s the first time I ever set foot in Martha's Vineyard. Elite. Fancy. Expensive. Hard to get to. The Estrich family from Lynn considered Nantasket Beach exotic. Martha's Vineyard might as well have been an island off Spain.

I don't begrudge the president a nice vacation. But having already spent time in Maine this summer, a second vacation to a place other than the hard-hit Gulf is an invitation for people to think what too many of them already think: The president just doesn't get it. He doesn't understand what's happening out there, out here. People still don't have jobs, home values still haven't recovered, and 401(k)s are still in a slump. The only signs of recovery are a lot of highway projects, which, as we are told every day when the traffic slows, are being paid for by us.

Updates:

Of course, the misery of the labor market statistics just reemphasizes the elite - populace divide. The AP reports - Discontent with the Modern Political Class

The price to taxpayers is adding up especially as Michelle is planning to meet the Spanish king and, that way, make the government pay a good part of the trip. Even without it:

Official portions of the trip will be picked up by the taxpayer, including transport on the Air Force version of a 757, which would cost around $146,000 (£91,900) for the round trip (not including four to five days' ground time), and her mandatory Secret Service detail. At an estimated 70 agents - at the $273-a-day federal per diem for five days, that's just over £60,000 for Secret Service room and board.

That's a grand total of £150,000 - and that's just for starters.

Mourning father in glitzy Spanish riviera

Nile Gardiner in the TelegraphThe Obama presidency increasingly resembles a modern-day Ancien Régime: extravagant and out of touch with the American people