Presidentin’ is Hard

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Obama is President Passive over the Veterans Affairs scandal

It doesn’t inspire great confidence that President Obama, on the day he finally decided to comment about excessive wait times for veterans’ medical appointments, showed up late to read his statement.

The White House briefing room is only about 100 feet from the Oval Office, but Obama arrived 13 minutes after the scheduled time for his remarks, the first since the day the scandal broke late last month with a report that 40 veterans had died in Phoenix while waiting to see doctors.

Over the weekend, the president’s chief of staff assured the public that Obama was “madder than hell” about what happened at the Department of Veterans Affairs, but in person Obama didn’t seem very angry. Like VA Secretary Eric Shinseki, Obama wasn’t entirely convinced something bad had happened.

“If these allegations prove to be true, it is dishonorable,” he said. “If there is misconduct, it will be punished.”

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{{YAWN}}

Same shit, different day. How many different crises and scandals get the same “all talk – no action” response from the White House? As with everything else, you can only count on Obama doing one of two things:

1. Evading responsibility

2. Claiming credit

You can practically write his speeches ahead of time:

“Nobody is more _________ than I am. I will not rest until _________ is __________.”

Ace:

Yet another new scandal which Obama — perhaps the most passive and reactive president in history — did nothing to avert, and now wishes to do nothing to solve it, except to let the bureaucracy work through its routine processes.

He claims to have an extraordinary level of anger about each new scandal, and yet then orders the bureaucracy to engage in ordinary CYA procedures in response to each.

Is not extraordinary interest usually matched by extraordinary actions?

Always he says the same things:

1. He’s “mad. Or “angry.” Or “madder than hell.” Or even “apopleptic.” Obama vows he’s much, much angrier than you are — “no one is angrier than I am” — despite having no appearances of actual anger. Rather like a very controlled, uptight WASP Hulk.

2 He vows to “get to the bottom of this.” He says this in a way to suggest that he, personally, will be getting to the bottom of this. Of course he doesn’t. Within a week he’s playing golf and parcheesi with the White House motor pool.

3. Despite pronouncing this newest scandal extraordinary, he then demands that we… allow the routine, ordinary Bureaucratic Process to fix everything.

“Putting something in the process” is standard Bureaucratic jargon meaning that “nothing is being done and go f*** yourself raw.”

At no point does he ever captain some kind of serious investigation. He continues doing what he always does — playing golf, fundraising, giving partisan speeches about trivial matters.

In fact, after his obligatory hemming about how goshdarn “angry” he is, he and his minions work extraordinarily hard to change the subject and distract the public, which is dumb and easily distracted, and also distract the press, which is even dumber and even more easily distracted, with some Very Important Twitter Meme that the White House Communication shop came up with 30 minutes ago.

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Pick a White House scandal – any White House scandal – now tell me who got fired.

{{Final Jeopardy music}}

Five and a half years in and I’m still waiting for the media to admit the obvious – Obama is epically incompetent. He ran on competence, uniting the country and government reform.

Fail, fail, fail.

We’ve learned the hard way that Mr. Obama’s skill sets are far more oriented toward community organizing than they are to governing. On every front, he is overmatched by events. It’s painful to watch a man who is so obviously in over his head. And more and more Americans are suffering because of it.

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If only someone had seen this coming.

Oh, wait . . . we did!

{{sigh}}

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