Posted on 12/13/2016 8:44:57 AM PST by rhett october
Appearing Monday evening on Comedy Central’s “The Daily Show,” President Obama said:
“I think the President-Elect may say one thing and do another once he’s here because the truth of the matter is it’s a big, complicated world and it doesn’t matter how smart you are, you have to have the best information possible to make the best decisions possible and my experience with our intelligence agencies is, they are not perfect, they’d be the first to acknowledge that, but they are full of extraordinarily hard working, patriotic, and knowledgeable experts and if you’re not getting their perspective – their detailed perspective – then you are flying blind.”
President Obama said this referencing reports that President-elect Trump was attending one security briefing per week, with Vice President-elect Pence attending six of them.
The media has also been quickly critical of Trump only attending weekly security briefings and left-wing social media accounts have blown up with what some call “manufactured outrage” concerning Trump’s weekly attendances.
To hear the media and anti-Trump Facebook posters, it’s an outrage that the President-Elect is missing these important meetings and unprecedented for a president or president-elect to do so. This, they say, shows that Trump does not take the office seriously.
But inquiring minds might ask where the mainstream media and these social posters were when, after six years in office, President Obama had attended a minority of these security briefings himself. According to a report by the Government Accountability Institute, Obama had attended only 42.1% of security briefings after his first 6 years in office.
Much of Obama’s lack of attendance came out in a 60 Minutes interview over two years ago when Obama was pressed on his administration’s inaction in preventing the rise of ISIS. Obama shifted blame to the intelligence personnel around him, saying, “I think our head of the intelligence community, Jim Clapper, has acknowledged that I think they underestimated what has been taking place in Syria.”
Members of the Defense establishment were apparently stunned by Obama’s attempt to shift blame.
“Either the president doesn’t read the intelligence he’s getting or he’s bullshitting,” a former senior Pentagon official “who worked closely on the threat posed by Sunni jihadists in Syria and Iraq” told the Daily Beast.
The following Monday, others in the intelligence community joined the response to Obama saying that he’s shown longstanding disinterest in receiving live, in-person briefings that allow the Commander-in-Chief the chance for critical followup, feedback and questions.
As reported at Breitbart and the Daily Mail, current and former staffers commented that:
It’s pretty well-known that the president hasn’t taken in-person intelligence briefings with any regularity since the early days of 2009.It’s starting to affect morale around here. Any time you’re hired by a boss to advise him about what to do in a high-stakes area, and he ignores you for a long time, it’s going to gnaw at you.
So while Obama has jumped on the bandwagon to criticize President-Elect Trump for only weekly attendance of security briefings, it might be that Trump is attending more regularly than President Obama did and that he is better informed since his Vice President attends six days per week.
At the very least we can say that Obama appears to have conveniently changed his tune from when he didn’t seem to think that security briefings warranted much of his time. Maybe he’s speaking as a man who has learned his lesson and is offering genuine advice to the incoming president. Or maybe he’s just taking some final shots at a man who could harm his legacy because Obama believes Trump is going to work harder on behalf of American interests than he did. We will probably never know for sure. One thing we can know, however, is that Obama is throwing stones from a glass house concerning the issue of security-briefings attendance and the contrast in terms of the media giving Obama a pass after six years but being critical of Trump before he’s even taken office wreaks of hypocrisy. In other news, the sun rose again this morning.
STFU Obama...you didn’t even go to half of them...screwing off on a golf course is much more important.
Hypocrisy, thy name is Obama
All those years voting “present” should have clued everyone into Obama’s work ethic.
I’m looking forward to after the EC vote so Trump can stop feeling like he needs to be polite to this dirtbag.
I dont recall Bush behaving this way towards Obama
Oh--that's right--It never happened
Once again, we see the all too familiar Bush pattern.
Democrats make nasty remark after nasty remark, daily, hourly. They lie their socks off, and their nonsense is carried instantly by the MSM.
Republicans say not a word. No answer. Where are Trump’s famous tweets? Has he no one who can answer for him?
Is it me or is this guy insane? He doesn't even realize that people know he didn't listen to anything he didn't want to hear.
P.S. Welcome to FR.
Despite all his shortcomings, Bush showed a lot of class, angering most of US, here in FR, because he was SO silent about zero.
Dems love classy republicans. That’s how they win
President blame must have had his finger bones fused.
Thank you for the welcome. And you are right on in your assessment - Obama had preconceived ideas about the world and if what our intelligence folks told him didn’t jive with that, they were “wrong” and ignored by BO.
And the MSM called him on it.
Oh, sorry, my mistake, they didn’t.
I heard his remarks on NPR - unchallenged, btw - and thought, man, he certainly has hubris.
He wasn’t golfing....more like doing the...
I read early on that Trump would operate the Presidency like a business in that Pence would be responsible for day to day operations and trump would be the big idea guy and the one who hires the doers.
It seems like it is playing out that way.
It’s more than hypocrisy. I truly believe Obama is a sociopath. Most of things that come out of his mouth are lies. Bald-faced lies which he full well knows are lies but he doesn’t care because he believes he is “special” and above accountability and scrutiny. In his mind (or the bubble he lives in) laws, morals, ethics, common decency and anything else that puts limits upon the rest of us, do not apply to him. This is something that all sociopaths have in common.
Aside from not killing millions of people in gulags or concentration camps, he reminds me of Hitler and Stalin. Both of those monsters lived a delusional life where they believed that anything they said was true and above reproach.
Stalin constantly sought, purged, imprisoned and murdered imaginary enemies by the millions.
While being overrun on the eastern front by the Russians, Hitler directed his generals to mobilize imaginary German divisions to reinforce his army in Stalingrad. He knew full well that those divisions didn’t exist but believed he could conjure them out of thin air by his will alone.
Obama is no different. He thinks he can make something true simply by saying it is so. That’s a sociopath.
Not only that, but most of the time the PDB is the only thing on his daily schedule; which means that on many or most days he does NOTHING! (Also the PDB doesn't ever seem to be scheduled earlier than 10 AM. Lazy much?)
[Note that the linked schedule changes from day to day so as I type, today's schedule has twice the usual number of events. (I.e. two.) At the bottom of the page that comes up, there are links to previous days' schedules.]
ML/NJ
Ah, Barky has forgotten that when he points one finger at Trump, he’s got multiple pointing right at himself. (c;
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.