Posted on 10/13/2012 5:16:04 PM PDT by Kenny
The last few weeks have produced many intriguing political moments, but none as shocking as the revelation that President Obama has been absent from the vast majority of his daily intelligence briefings.
According to a study by the Government Accountability Institute, Obama failed to attend a single Presidential Daily Brief (PDB) in the week leading up to the recent anniversary of 9/11 and the chaos that erupted in the Arab world. The mere fact that we were approaching 9/11 was a crucial enough reason to attend not one but all the briefings. President Obama attended none.
Worse, this is apparently nothing new. Obama attended only 43.8 percent of his Daily Briefs in the first 1,225 days of his administration. For this year, he attended a little over a third.
This is stunning, and there’s no excuse for it.
Washington Post columnist Marc Thiessen, who worked for President George W. Bush, pressed NSC spokesman Tommy Vietor for an explanation. Thiessen reported:
Vietor did not dispute the numbers, but said the fact that the president, during a time of war, does not attend his daily intelligence meeting on a daily basis is “not particularly interesting or useful.” He says that the president reads his PDB every day, and he disagreed with the suggestion that there is any difference whatsoever between simply reading the briefing book and having an interactive discussion of its contents with top national security and intelligence officials where the president can probe assumptions and ask questions. “I actually don’t agree at all,” Vietor told me in an e-mail. “The president gets the information he needs from the intelligence community each day.”
That’s simply the White House covering for the president.
Similarly, White House spokesman Jay Carney dismissed the PDB charge as “hilarious.” No, no, said Carney, the president “gets it every day.” By “it,” Carney was apparently talking about the intelligence briefing papers, not the actual meetings.
Pro-Obama journalists happily accepted Carney’s explanation. CNN posted Carney’s comments under a photo of a pensive Obama sitting at an intelligence briefing.
Sorry, but, once again, there’s no excuse for this, especially in the post-9/11 world. George W. Bush not only didn’t miss the PDB but actually expanded it to six meetings per week.
Consider, too, the case of Ronald Reagan, who liberals, ironically, portrayed as an uninformed idiot who didn’t pay attention in meetings or read anything.
Reagan, in fact, attended the daily intelligence briefing. I could lay this out at length, but here I’ll offer just two Reagan sources, both still living, who can speak to this:
One source is Herb Meyer, special assistant to CIA director Bill Casey in the 1980s. Meyer told me: “Of course Reagan attended all those daily briefings. And after the briefers returned to CIA headquarters, Bill [Casey] would meet with them just to be sure the president (and Haig & Weinberger) got answers to whatever questions they may have had. In short, it was a very—very—serious business.”
Another source is Bill Clark. Clark was Ronald Reagan’s right-hand man in foreign policy. As his biographer, I know Clark well. He is 80 years old and lives in California. Clark told me this about Reagan and the PDB:
Bill Casey would, by courier, send the President’s Daily Brief each morning at about 5:00 a.m. to our war room downstairs in our [National] Security Council…. It would be delivered to the president in his residence before he came over [by 7:00 a.m.]…. He’d write questions all over the margins about things that weren’t clear in the briefing. And, of course, the agency [CIA] would come down with further explanations.
Clark recalls how Reagan craved that regular morning update. He would read it, and then they would meet. Reagan ate up these briefings. He asked questions of his advisers. He probed for ideas. Reagan attended the briefings and used them as presidents should.
When Reagan finished his presidency, after two terms, genuine freedom and democracy were surging all over the communist world.
As for President Obama, if he’s in the process of finishing his presidency, after one term, he’s facing a surge of radical Islamic fundamentalism in the Middle East. Can any of that be blamed on Obama’s failure to attend these routine briefings? Maybe, maybe not, but it certainly can’t help.
In fact, as Marc Theissen and the Government Accountability Institute have noted in follow-up stories, Obama is now suddenly attending his daily briefing. That’s no doubt a response to political criticism. But could it be—on the heels of the eruptions in Libya and Egypt, which Obama initially blamed not on pre-meditated terrorism but a video—that maybe President Obama feels like he might have been missing something?
JUSTICE FOR AMERICA..WITH JUDGE JANINE P.
ONE OF THE MOST INFORMATIVE SHOWS TELLING US WHAT IS HAPPENING TO OUR COUNTRY..
for those who missed this show watch for the repeat, and I think it is repeated on Sunday at nine p.m. and I know it is football Sunday, but Americans need to view this show.
Here’s the approach I’d take with it if I were Romney:
If, as the President says, he receives all the information he needed from the PDB and feels attending the meeting itself is unnecessary then why did his attendance at those meetings suddenly spike after the attacks in Benghazi on 9/11?
Either he was receiving all the information he needed beforehand without attending or he was not and is now covering up. The fact that he’s now attending them means he believes he wasn’t receiving the information he needed to.
Did his non-attendance lead directly to the success of the attack in Benghazi? Hard to say. What we do know for sure is that he cannot claim he did “everything in his power” to prevent that attack. Even he doesn’t believe that - as evidenced by his new-found interest in the attending the morning intelligence briefing.
Fast and Furious got broomed by the media but Benghazi has split open like a rotting corpse at the worst possible time for Obama.
i thought Col. MacInerney was going to stroke out!
obamma has to be one of the laziest presidents we have ever had.
Obama does not attend to ensure he has “plausible deniability” in his own mind. He intends to do nothing to thwart the efforts of the Muslim Brotherhood and Al Qaeda and does not want to have to “act” responsibly in front intelligence and military professionals.
The campaign needs to take up the slogan - He won’t defend our borders at home, why would he defend embassy borders abroad.
“Obama intelligence” oxymoron
Apparently none of the major news are reporting this.
A google news search of Obama Intelligence Brief only return a couple of MomAndPop websites.
I’ll bet you a dollar that the reason His Majesty doesn’t attend these briefings is because he doesn’t like hearing advice from people he perceives as underlings. It’s clear to me that Obama is extremely proud & haughty, and thinks he already knows whatever he needs to know. The experience of having people square off to him in the briefings and say, “You know, Mr. President, we really need to address this particular issue...” must really be the sand in his grits! So he avoids it by getting the written briefings instead ... which of course are not nearly so useful.
I'd be willing to bet it's because he can't handle the truth... especially coming from people who have seen more, faced more danger, and accomplished more before they were 30 years old than he could possibly dream of.
He doesn't see those kind of people as underlings. He fears them! He knows they are the Alpha dogs, and he knows damn well he's a Beta. They make him pee on the floor.
““Obama intelligence” oxymoron”
Surprised they’re not trying to tell us that Hussein is so intelligent that these daily intelligence meetings are beneath him.
Has Carney said this is “preposterous” yet?
Did Carney get his advice from Biden? Americans were tortured and murdered and this moron thinks it's funny.
No, but I think he said “malarkey”.
“What I fear is that as a “parting gift”
He put as much socialism in place as FDR did, and we are still seeing how all that played out. And the stuff LBJ gave us has not come, fully, to fruition.
He signed many bills (like the affordable healthcare act) that we won’t truly see the impact of for decades.
“Did Valerie Jarrett attend the briefings?”
The born in Iran Jarrett? Was Huma Abedin there too?
ping
“...But could it be—on the heels of the eruptions in Libya and Egypt, which Obama initially blamed not on pre-meditated terrorism but a video—that maybe President Obama feels like he might have been missing something?”
Nope. Picture Jim Carrey saying the line “It’s shoooowwwtime!”
Thanks! Will look for the re-air.
The Marxist scumbags ran from terrorism and decided to piss on the 1st Amendment as a diversion.
Path to 9-11-12.
“What I fear is that as a “parting gift” he has planted the seeds of multiple devastating terror attacks to occur all over our country starting Jan 21, 2013.”
I’ve thought of the same thing...
Just as 9/11 happened 8 months after W. was in office. Obviously, that terrorist attack was many years in the making and W. was blamed for it.
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