A report was released a few days ago that showed that President Obama routinely skips over half of his daily security briefs. This is not news, as similar reports were released during the 2012 election.
The response from the Obama Administration has always been that Obama still receives all of the information covered in the daily security brief, but that he prefers to receive the brief in writing. “He is a voracious consumer of all briefings,” said then Press Secretary Jay Carney, suggesting that the President devours the daily briefing documents every day, taking meticulous notes and preparing any questions for later meetings.
Most likely this is all an attempt to remind everyone just how cerebral this President is, especially in comparison to his predecessor George W. Bush – who rarely missed a security brief and generally preferred face to face meetings with his advisors.
I am by no means a Bush apologist. If you asked me for a list of George W. Bush policies with which I disagreed, I would ask if you preferred to have it in chronological or alphabetical order. And then it still might take a week to list them all.
But when Bush spoke, when he took action, two things were clear: first, that he asked others – particularly those who might be considered experts in their fields – for advice. And second, that his non-cerebral face-to-face meetings left him with a reasonable working knowledge of the situation at hand. His actions and policies, whether or not I agreed with them, reflected that.
Barack Obama, in contrast, though he “devours daily security briefs and takes meticulous notes,” is still continuously surprised by the 10 o'clock news. Things like the threats of an attack in Benghazi, the IRS targeting of conservative groups, the implementation and subsequent failure of Fast and Furious, and the abject failure of the Obamacare rollout should have been detailed in security briefs long before they were ever mentioned on the news. And yet, when the President claimed to be “just as shocked as the rest of us” when he “heard about it for the first time on the news, we were expected to buy it.
At this point, there is no way to escape the reality that the President is lying to America. He either is not reading his daily briefings or he knew about all of these things before the hit the airwaves. His completely inept actions, both domestically and internationally – and especially militarily – suggest the former.
