May 3, 2013
The Know-it-All Suddenly Knows Nothing
By John Ransom
5/2/2013
It’s probably because the tone of any organization is set from the top, the very pointy top.
Still it’s surprising that the administration that knows more about banking than bankers, more about healthcare than doctors, more about firearms than people who legally possess arms, more about budgets than citizens who have to balance their checkbooks and more about practically everything than anyone else, would admit that on a few things, they really know nothing.
“On most days it's hard to tell him he's wrong about anything,” recently confessed one top Democrat about the Commander in Brief.
It’s seems equally hard to TELL him about anything too.
But here it is:
Obama knows nothing about Benghazi.
He knows nothing about Boston’s Tsarnaev brothers.
He knows nothing about Fast and Furious; he knows nothing about green energy loans, either.
Yes, the man who recently proclaimed: I AM IN CHARGE NOW, FINALLY! knows nothing.
This seems strange coming from the administration that leaked every damn detail about how Barack Obama personally hunted down and killed Osama bin Laden, while simultaneously saving Detroit from bankruptcy… saved Detroit at least until after the election in 2012, that is.
The “I don’t know” claim is not just at odds with the know-it-all-ness of the administration either. It’s at odds with what others are saying, others who seem to know what they are talking about.
“The Kingdom of Saudi Arabia sent a written warning about accused Boston Marathon bomber Tamerlan Tsarnaev to the U.S. Department of Homeland Security in 2012,” reports the U.K.’s Daily Mail, “long before pressure-cooker blasts killed three and injured hundreds, according to a senior Saudi government official with direct knowledge of the document.”
The Department of Homeland Security and the White House however say they know nothing about it.
From the Daily Mail:
'DHS has no knowledge of any communication from the Saudi government regarding information on the suspects in the Boston Marathon Bombing prior to the attack,' MailOnline learned from one Homeland Security official who declined to be named in this report.
The White House took a similar view. 'We and other relevant U.S. government agencies have no record of such a letter being received,' said Caitlin Hayden, a spokesperson for the president’s National Security Council.Who? Us? We never got the message.
Russia had similar problems being understood in Washington says the Boston Globe: “In a closed briefing on Tuesday, members of the Senate Intelligence Committee learned that Russia alerted the United States about Tsarnaev in ‘multiple contacts’ -- including ‘at least once since October 2011,’ said Richard Burr, a Republican of North Carolina, speaking with reporters afterward.”
Obama? As I said, he knows nothing about it.
Too busy playing golf.
The Government Accountability Institute (GAI) says that in 2012 Obama spent less time on intelligence briefings than at any other time during his presidency. Last year Obama had 125 “daily” intelligence briefings on his calendar, availing himself of the “daily” briefing only 34.2 percent of the time. These briefing are most likely where a topics like “Hey, someone might be trying to blow-up the Boston Marathon next year,” might come up.
That means that Obama attended on average only 2.5 personal intelligence briefings for every seven-day week. That’s like showing up for your job on Monday, Wednesday and every other Friday.
They don’t call them “daily” briefings for nothing.
By contrast, the GAI says that Obama played 976 hours of golf while president of the United States.
The president’s daily briefing (PBD) has its roots in the Truman administration, although reporters often mistakenly say it started in 1961. Truman used to get a summary of the overnight developments that he called his “newspaper,” followed by a short briefing by a Naval Intelligence officer.
Bush had his PDBs from 8am to 9am.
Assuming one hour for daily intelligence briefings, Obama has spent 645 hours (of a possible 1800) on daily intelligence briefings and 976 on golf over the course of his presidency.
So, yes, of course he knows nothing.
It’s nice though that, finally, the administration is willing to admit they are as ignorant as the rest of us knew they were all along.
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