Tuesday - September 30, 2014

Not Even Half There

A new Government Accountability Institute (GAI) report reveals that President Barack Obama has attended only 42.1% of his daily intelligence briefings (known officially as the Presidential Daily Brief, or PDB) in the 2,079 days of his presidency through September 29, 2014.

The GAI report also included a breakdown of Obama’s PDB attendance record between terms; he attended 42.4% of his PDBs in his first term and 41.3% in his second.

The GAI’s alarming findings come on the heels of Obama’s 60 Minutes comments on Sunday, wherein the president laid the blame for the Islamic State’s (ISIS) rapid rise squarely at the feet of his Director of National Intelligence James Clapper.

“I think our head of the intelligence community, Jim Clapper, has acknowledged that I think they underestimated what had been taking place in Syria,” said Obama.

According to Daily Beast reporter Eli Lake, members of the Defense establishment were “flabbergasted” 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.

Actually, this news report doesn’t tell the whole story; the official government report shows that in 2012 Obama only made a third of his briefings, 34.2%. And so far in 2014 he’s batting 37.5%. Pretty damning if you ask me. He doesn’t seem to be trying that hard at all. It’s as if running the world was something left to Valerie Jarret to do, while he plays golf and does fundraisers ( a recent statistic shows that Obama has done a fundraiser on average every 5 days since moving into the White House ).

On Monday, others in the intelligence community similarly blasted Obama and said he’s shown longstanding disinterest in receiving live, in-person PDBs that allow the Commander-in-Chief the chance for critical followup, feedback, questions, and the challenging of flawed intelligence assumptions.

“It’s pretty well-known that the president hasn’t taken in-person intelligence briefings with any regularity since the early days of 2009,” an Obama national security staffer told the Daily Mail on Monday. “He gets them in writing.”

The Obama security staffer said the president’s PDBs have contained detailed threat warnings about the Islamic State dating back to before the 2012 presidential election.

Right, in writing. No chance for questions, clarification, anything. Just check off the boxes and get a C+ for attendance.

Looks like our Joy From Illinois is still just voting Present.

Posted by Drew458     on 09/30/2014 at 12:46 PM   
Filed Under: • Obama, The One •  
• Comments (2) • Trackbacks(0)  Permalink •  

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