Is this a creepy picture to anyone else?

That’s a picture from Hawaii, where Reggie Love, Obama’s “body man,” accompanied the president on vacation.

As it happens, Love once more accompanied Obama on vacation, this time to his media-blacked-out trip to Florida over the weekend at which golf with Tiger Woods was on the agenda. Obama’s wife Michelle didn’t go on that trip; she took a vacation someplace else on the taxpayers’ dime. But Reggie Love was on Obama’s plane there and back from DC.

Reggie Love is the subject of lots of rumors. Nobody really understands what a “body man” is, or why Obama has one. Nobody seems to remember any other president having a “body man,” and nobody seems to remember anybody else unrelated to a president who could talk about the circumstances surrounding when he might floss his teeth.

Are we suggesting that Obama and Reggie Love are engaged in a homosexual relationship?

No. We are not.

What we are, however, suggesting, is that if Obama was a Republican president you can bet your bottom dollar that the media would be far, far more curious about the relationship between these two men and whatever potential impropriety, sexual or otherwise, might be afoot between a president who needs a “body man” and that “body man.”

And when Obama The Republican President takes his “body man” who has been the subject of rumors to the very gay-friendly West Palm Beach, Florida for a weekend vacation at which neither Obama’s wife nor the media are invited, that curiosity could be expected to bloom like Washington’s cherry trees in springtime.

One mightn’t be surprised to see Obama The Republican President lampooned by late-night comedians for his unusual relationship with Reggie Love, and the papers, lefty web sites and network news shows full of the most lurid and salacious gossip about the president’s peculiar associations.

But since Obama is no Republican, the media has no interest whatever in Reggie Love after five years of his off-and-on attachment to the president.

Maybe that’s as it should be. I personally don’t particularly want to know what Reggie Love is to the president. I trust he’s been given adequate security clearance so that his association with Obama doesn’t present the threat to our national interest that, say, John Brennan or Chuck Hagel present.

But I do find the disparate treatment of the Obama-Love association striking after seeing the rectal examination afforded to past Republican presidents for their associations. And so should you.