Yeah -- there is a new Congress and Gibbs is leaving and Michelle Obama has a new chief of staff. But this can no longer be ignored: President Obama, on his recent Hawaii vacation, wore cheap rubber flip-flops. The kind you buy at CVS. America! Oh, the humanity!

The New York Post had it on the cover today (pictured):

Scooting around Hawaii last week, President Obama broke one more historic barrier by setting a new benchmark for the limits of presidential casual wear. He was wearing flip-flops. Historians agreed it was the first time they could remember seeing the leader of the free world snapped in a public setting, wearing nothing more than a flimsy strip of rubber on his feet.

First the mom jeans, now this. Another sartorial crisis! The NYP says it may be the first public sighting of Obama's feet. We beg to differ. The blog is on record noting, with delicate restraint, the president's existing penchant for the casual, leather mandal. So yes, New York Post, we as a nation have seen the presidential toes. Not willingly -- but we have. 

The paper, noting that Obama's full-exposure footwear falls far short of Russian PM Vladimir Putin's shirtless, manly fishing photos, finally decides that flip-flops are OK -- in context:

"I don’t think this is a big deal,” said presidential historian Jane Hampton Cook, author of an upcoming children’s book What Does the President Look Like? “Your footwear belongs to the occasion. If you’re on the beach buying your daughter snow cones, I don’t think you can beat him up for this. Now if he’s wearing flip-flops to the State of the Union, that’d be different.”

We shall have to see. Maybe flip-flops will be just the thing for State of the Union, tentatively set for Jan. 25.