Obama: Our do-nothing president

Deroy Murdock savages Obama’s do-nothing habits.  We’ve heard that before from many Obama critics, but Murdock column is particularly good, because he gives a perfect metaphor regarding Obama’s decision merely to read his national security briefings, rather than to attend that actual meetings (and that’s assume Obama really does read the briefings, and doesn’t just toss them on his desk, partially or entirely unread):

This phenomenon’s most chilling example involves Obama’s national-security-related Presidential Daily Brief (PDB). As the Government Accountability Institute (GAI) calculated, and Washington Post columnist Marc Thiessen first reported, Obama attended only 43.8 percent of his PDBs between January 23, 2009 (three days after his inauguration), and May 31, 2012. Available nearly every day, the PDB allows the commander-in-chief to hear directly from top intelligence professionals about the latest threats to U.S. safety. These experts are on hand to answer questions, hear suggestions, and otherwise help Obama foil America’s enemies.

But Obama has had higher priorities.

According to GAI’s data, which was culled from the official White House calendar and Politico’s news coverage of that schedule, Obama chose to skip his PDBs and, instead, simply read his briefing book. This is a bit like studying one’s chest X-rays at home, having spurned a radiologist’s offer to interpret them and answer pertinent questions. In this sense, Obama quietly reviewed his national-security X-rays alone during 56.2 percent of the time GAI analyzed. In 2011, Obama missed 61.6 percent of his PDBs.

What makes all of this worse is that Obama is a compulsive liar, something that was already obvious on the campaign trail in 2008. His latest lie was to tell a Hispanic audience that (a) immigration reform had been his highest priority, but (b) the nasty Republicans blocked his every effort. The facts show that, when Obama owned a fully Democrat Congress that did everything he wanted, immigration reform never even crossed his radar.

I don’t actually think Obama is a slacker. I think he’s perfected the art of doing nothing in order to achieve his goals. Don’t like Israel? Ignore it. Iran will take care of it in all due time. Don’t really care about immigration reform? Ignore it, and then lie about it later in order to shift blame.

Put another way, Obama isn’t a slacker. Instead, he is the most passive-aggressive man ever to occupy the White House. His do-nothingness is carefully targeted to achieve specific ends.