Obama says “if only Obama knew”…
…about the problems in the VA:
White House Press Secretary Jay Carney…told reporters that President Barack Obama first learned from a TV news report that his Veterans Administration was denying medical care to vets with secret off-the-books-waiting lists.
The actual quote is this; note how careful Carney is to parse his words about the “specific” reports, because he knows that the White House was told about the general problem when Obama first took office in 2008:
A CNN reporter asked Carney on Monday when the president was ‘first made aware … of these fraudulent lists that were being kept to hide the wait times’ at VA medical centers.
‘You mean the specific allegations,’ Carney asked, ‘that I think were reported first by your news network out of Phoenix, I believe?’
‘We learned about them through the reports.
He’s a sly one, that Carney, isn’t he?
As for Obama, it’s a good thing we have the news, because otherwise he’d never learn about anything that happened under his watch:
After the Operation Fast and Furious scandal broke, Obama responded to national outrage in an interview broadcast by CNN’s John King on October 12, 2011, similarly saying he was out of the loop until he turned on his television…
A few months into his presidency, Obama’s White House approved an unannounced New York City flyover by Air Force One…It was a mistake,’ the president said on April 28, 2009, the day after the flight. ‘It was something we found out about along with all of you. And it will not happen again.’
Last year on May 14, Carney told reporters that Obama had learned about his Department of Justice seizing two months’ worth of Associated Press journalists’ phone records ‘from news reports yesterday, on the road.’
‘We don’t have any independent knowledge of that,’ Carney insisted.
That punt came just one day after Obama himself told the Washington press corps during a joint press conference with UK Prime Minister David Cameron that he was in the dark ”“ until it hit news reports ”“ that the Internal Revenue Service had targeted conservative nonprofit groups for special inquisitions when they applied for tax-exempt status.
‘I first learned about it from the same news reports that I think most people learned about this,’ he said in the East Room of the White House on May 13, 2013. I think it was on Friday…
Why shouldn’t Obama keep doing this? With the cooperation of the MSM, it has worked for him so far.
I’ve never seen a president who knew so little about so much, yet can still claim that he knows so much about what needs to be done.
Obama has the worst case of innocent bystander I ever saw. He never knows anything until he sees it in the newspaper or on TV.
And they said Sarah Palin was too dumb to be VP or P.
Well said, Callahan. Who could imagine that the smartest man in the room would also always be the most uninformed?
It’s not stupidity, it’s cupidity. And he knows he can get away with it. It’s another way to give the finger to his opponents.
When I was flying, people used to talk about pilots who were so far behind their aircraft, an accident could happen and they would not show up for an hour. Chairman O reminds me of this. He can’t be that clueless, can he?
No.
Roman, of course not. He lies. The media cover him
Of course he can be that clueless! He’s never actually DONE anything in his life. Why should he start now?
IMO the messiah is a lazy ‘folk’ who doesn’t need to pay attention because VJ runs the show, and the minions running the day to day operations know the desired results without too much need for specific directions. Lois Lerner and others in the IRS knew the Oval Office wanted to squelch the conservative groups and went after them. The dude boy and his fellow apparatchiks knew the OO wanted smoke and mirrors to cover up dereliction of duty when the Benghazi massacre opened up questions about the messiah’s role as CINC.
Of course the idea that the messiah learned about all these scandals from the MSM is utterly lame. But he also knows he can lie about anything and not be seriously question by the MSM.
The Chauncey Gardiner presidency, without the humor.
If only Hussein knew what happened to traitors in America…
VA is single-payer healthcare and a preview of what awaits us. That the VA debacle is as much a case of incompetence as it is inadequate funding changes the realities of single payer not in the least. The UK demonstrates the future of US healthcare, Sarah Palin was absolutely right about the death panel aspect.
Activist leftists are well aware of this; Former Labor Secretary and Obama adviser Robert Reich speaking at UC Berkeley on Sept. 26, 2007 [to a young, going to live forever audience]
83% of all health care expenditures are accounted for by 10% of our population. Leftist health care activists are certainly aware of this fact. They’re also aware of the fact that the older the voter, the more likely they are to vote on the right.
On another blog’s post commenter sesummers correctly if brutally noted that,
For all its sins, the Catholic Church is absolutely right in pointing out where the path that a societal disrespect for life leads.
So I guess this is the presidential version of voting “present?” He’s in charge, yet makes no decisions and is the last to know about his own administration’s incompetence.
G.B.-
I am no Catholic; my forebears worshipped with Martin Luther. The Catholic Church, like all human endeavors, has its flaws, its crooks and idolators. But the Great Message it has conveyed these many centuries comes directly from Jesus, and if we lose the message amidst the trappings of human frailties the fault is ours.
He certainly lacks any knowledge of historical events and the lessons that can be learned from same. So perhaps it shouldn’t be a surprise that he knows nothing of current events either. Which begs the question, what does he really know and understand.
JJ has the right of it. Obama knows all he wishes to know and what isn’t reported to him is the result of prior direction by him to others. It’s all on his shoulders. Either directly or to ensure ‘plausible deniability’.
It’s not incompetence. It’s engineered failure and emergency rule.
Incompetence suggests that they tried but couldn’t make it work.
Every Democrat is guilty of this, whether they know it or not. Why? The same reason behind institutional slavery and why white privilege leads to white guilt, whether the whites know it or not.
If you benefit from evil, you are tainted by evil, no matter whether you willed it or not.
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