HyscienceOne of the inconvenient truths about Obama is that his rhetoric rarely has any relationship with truth (e.g; purposeful Obamacare-related lies), this spying scandal being only the latest example.
Via the L.A. Times:
The White House and State Department signed off on surveillance targeting phone conversations of friendly foreign leaders, current and former U.S. intelligence officials said Monday, pushing back against assertions that President Obama and his aides were unaware of the high-level eavesdropping.Professional staff members at the National Security Agency and other U.S. intelligence agencies are angry, these officials say, believing the president has cast them adrift as he tries to distance himself from the disclosures by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden that have strained ties with close allies. …
[…] Obama may not have been specifically briefed on NSA operations targeting a foreign leader’s cellphone or email communications, one of the officials said “But certainly the National Security Council and senior people across the intelligence community knew exactly what was going on, and to suggest otherwise is ridiculous.”If U.S. spying on key foreign leaders was news to the White House, current and former officials said, then White House officials have not been reading their briefing books.
More here.
As Jennifer Rubin writes at the WaPo, the list of things Obama didn’t know continues to grow every week:
The IRS scandal, the deteriorating security situation in Libya, spying on German Chancellor Angela Merkel, spying on journalists and the Obamacare mess. Those are just a few of the things we have been told at one time or another that President Obama he didn’t know about before learning about them in the media. Note to media: You have a critical job in briefing the president, so err on side of over-inclusion.
Then there are the things he had wrong or knew better but said anyway: There is a fatwa in Iran against nuclear weapons, “You will get to keep your health-care plan,” the Benghazi attack was related to an anti- Muslim video, and no predecessor had been compelled to negotiate a budget deal in the context of a potential government shutdown.
All of which prompts several questions:
Who is running the government? Why is the president content not to know so many things? At this point one has to conclude he is intentionally ignorant. If he really wanted to be in the loop, people who didn’t inform him would be fired and the pace of “I didn’t know” excuses would slow. Instead it’s ticked up. Perhaps he refuses to hear bad news. Maybe his second-term team is hopelessly incompetent. Whatever the reason, Obama’s ignorance is no longer (if it ever had been) a valid excuse. His continual cluelessness is an indictment now of his administration’s collapse.
Keep reading …, Rubin has a list of more things that Obama may not know.
http://www.hyscience.com/archives/2013/10/liar-in-chief_u.php