The last few weeks have produced many intriguing political moments, but none as shocking as the revelation that President Obama has been absent from the vast majority of his daily intelligence briefings.
According to a study by the Government Accountability Institute, Obama failed to attend a single Presidential Daily Brief (PDB) in the week leading up to the recent anniversary of 9/11 and the chaos that erupted in the Arab world. The mere fact that we were approaching 9/11 was a crucial enough reason to attend not one but all the briefings. President Obama attended none.
Worse, this is apparently nothing new. Obama attended only 43.8 percent of his Daily Briefs in the first 1,225 days of his administration. For this year, he attended a little over a third.
This is stunning, and there’s no excuse for it.
Washington Post columnist Marc Thiessen, who worked for President George W. Bush, pressed NSC spokesman Tommy Vietor for an explanation. Thiessen reported:
Vietor did not dispute the numbers, but said the fact that the president, during a time of war, does not attend his daily intelligence meeting on a daily basis is “not particularly interesting or useful.” He says that the president reads his PDB every day, and he disagreed with the suggestion that there is any difference whatsoever between simply reading the briefing book and having an interactive discussion of its contents with top national security and intelligence officials where the president can probe assumptions and ask questions. “I actually don’t agree at all,” Vietor told me in an e-mail. “The president gets the information he needs from the intelligence community each day.”
That’s simply the White House covering for the president.
Similarly, White House spokesman Jay Carney dismissed the PDB charge as “hilarious.” No, no, said Carney, the president “gets it every day.” By “it,” Carney was apparently talking about the intelligence briefing papers, not the actual meetings.
Pro-Obama journalists happily accepted Carney’s explanation. CNN posted Carney’s comments under a photo of a pensive Obama sitting at an intelligence briefing.
Sorry, but, once again, there’s no excuse for this, especially in the post-9/11 world. George W. Bush not only didn’t miss the PDB but actually expanded it to six meetings per week.
Consider, too, the case of Ronald Reagan, who liberals, ironically, portrayed as an uninformed idiot who didn’t pay attention in meetings or read anything.
Reagan, in fact, attended the daily intelligence briefing. I could lay this out at length, but here I’ll offer just two Reagan sources, both still living, who can speak to this:
One source is Herb Meyer, special assistant to CIA director Bill Casey in the 1980s. Meyer told me: “Of course Reagan attended all those daily briefings. And after the briefers returned to CIA headquarters, Bill [Casey] would meet with them just to be sure the president (and Haig & Weinberger) got answers to whatever questions they may have had. In short, it was a very—very—serious business.”
Another source is Bill Clark. Clark was Ronald Reagan’s right-hand man in foreign policy. As his biographer, I know Clark well. He is 80 years old and lives in California. Clark told me this about Reagan and the PDB:
Bill Casey would, by courier, send the President’s Daily Brief each morning at about 5:00 a.m. to our war room downstairs in our [National] Security Council…. It would be delivered to the president in his residence before he came over [by 7:00 a.m.]…. He’d write questions all over the margins about things that weren’t clear in the briefing. And, of course, the agency [CIA] would come down with further explanations.
Clark recalls how Reagan craved that regular morning update. He would read it, and then they would meet. Reagan ate up these briefings. He asked questions of his advisers. He probed for ideas. Reagan attended the briefings and used them as presidents should.
When Reagan finished his presidency, after two terms, genuine freedom and democracy were surging all over the communist world.
As for President Obama, if he’s in the process of finishing his presidency, after one term, he’s facing a surge of radical Islamic fundamentalism in the Middle East. Can any of that be blamed on Obama’s failure to attend these routine briefings? Maybe, maybe not, but it certainly can’t help.
In fact, as Marc Theissen and the Government Accountability Institute have noted in follow-up stories, Obama is now suddenly attending his daily briefing. That’s no doubt a response to political criticism. But could it be—on the heels of the eruptions in Libya and Egypt, which Obama initially blamed not on pre-meditated terrorism but a video—that maybe President Obama feels like he might have been missing something?
Dr. Paul Kengor is professor of political science at Grove City College, executive director of The Center for Vision & Values, and New York Times best-selling author of the book, “The Communist: Frank Marshall Davis, The Untold Story of Barack Obama’s Mentor.” His other books include “The Crusader: Ronald Reagan and the Fall of Communism” and“Dupes: How America’s Adversaries Have Manipulated Progressives for a Century.”
©2012 The Center for Vision & Values at Grove City College
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GIVE ME A BREAK. Blowbama attending ANY meetings in the last 8 months? What a joke the Pretender-in-Chief TRULY is. And just NOW, the POS is “supposedly” attending his ‘intelligence briefings’, which, for this adMINIstration, is a TRUE oxymoron, and is TYPICAL DUMBocrat politicking. Just like the complete implosion of Jokebama’s FAILED debate showing, this POS thinks that he can show up at the last minute and then everything will magically fall in place. This ain’t a semester’s worth of Geometry that you can pull an all-nighter for, you inept, bungling, sorry excuse for a leader….the world is crumbling at your feet, you A$$hole, and Al Qaida and the Taliban are breathing down your sweaty neck, you SOB. No LIES, and no COVER-UPS will get you out of this DEBACLE, you Piece Of Totally Unqualified Sh*t.
One and DONE…for (what is left of) America.
Hehas attended about a third of the metings and none in the weeks leading up to 9/11 so he had no idea about the problems in benghazi – nor did he care.
iT SHOULD NOT BE A SRPRISE THAT oBAMA IS SHOWING HIS LACK OF INTELLIGENCE, AFTER ALL, HIS WHOLE LIFE IS ONE OF LIES. GOING TO AN INTELLIGANCE BRIEFING IS WAY OVER HI INTELLIGENCE LEVEL, SO HE PLAYS HOOKEY, AND AGAIN LEAVES BEHIND AN EMPTY CHAIR. BESIDES, PLAYING GOLF AND BEGGING FOR MONEY IS WHAT HE DOES BEST, NEXT TO LYING.
Doesn’t if make you feel safe that he no longer is even showing up to vote “present?”
I’m trying hard to believe that NObama was the only player in this web of lies. Obviously, the man is not intelligent enough to pull this off on his own. He had co-conspiritors..once he’s voted out, he should be brought up on charges.
Along with ALL who were complicit.
Give us a break, why would he attend an intelligence briefing. He knows what the moslems are doing he organizes it with his brotherhood friends in Egypt and the like. Besides, it would interfere with his golf game, partying and collecting money from his foreign friends to pay for hsi next attempt to steal the election and his safew and comfortable retirement, just in case all his fraudulent moves fail.
I also forgot, who said he was intelligent?
Why is Obama’s missing his intelligence briefings surprising? The man has no work ethic at all. He would rather watch or play basketball. Play golf. Or, campaign than do any work. Don’t forget; everything has been handed to him all his life. He didn’t do much work as a law lecturer, lawyer, state senator and U.S. Senator.
Obama not attending is probably a good thing,since I highly doubt that he would understand any of the information that the intelligence team might be trying to present to him. Personally I think that it is wrong of us to expect him to try and govern, when we know that he has been in the campaign mode for te past eighteen months, out collecting money from the fat cats in Hollywood, at his endless money raising events.
A man has only so much time to spend between playing golf, planning his extravagant vacations, searching for his 40 plus million dollar home on the Island of Hawaii once he os out of office, planing his next adventure flight on Air Force One and trying to fit in intelligence briefings on a daily bases, with all of the turmoil that he himself single handedly created by giving Egypt and Libya to the Muslim Brotherhood, is more than anyone man should be expected to endure.
Personally with all that is going on in his life, I have no idea how he is able to sleep. The only explanation that I could possibly have, is that he is so incredibly narcissistic, that absolutely nothing fazes him, absolutely nothing.
If Romney wins the presidential election, Obama won’t believe that he could possibly have lost, his brain would not be able to cope with that sort of reality. Hopefully he will have to try and deal with that eventuality in the foreseeable future.
Why would a puppet need to attend intelligence briefings?
It is unthinkable to compare Obuminable to President Reagan. Gross!!!
There are a couple of simple reasons Obumination ignores the Intelligence Briefings.” First, he really believes he already knows all about all, that he is the walking, breathing existence of omniscience. Second, he really believes a communistic form of government, led under Sahria (?) Law, by a muslim radical dictator (himself) is preferable to our current democratic republic. He wants the murdering muslims to sodomize, rape, torture, and kill Americans. Hold it! Don’t try to dispute what I’ve said. Ask the Americans who were murdered in Libya. Take an honest look at the proof that Obuma not only did not care, he wanted to cover-up the entire thing by blaming it on a “movie” not one person involved in the sodomy and murder of American citizens had ever seen, or even heard about. Do any of you really believe that a junk “movie” is a valid reason to organize and carry out an attack on people who had nothing whatsoever to do with that “movie,” who, like yourself, didn’t even know it existed? Obuma certainly believes such idiocy justifies the murder of innocent American citizens – as long as those murders are done in the name of Islam. He KNEW the who planned and executed the attack and murdered our fellow Americans within hours, maybe seconds. In fact, he probaly knew it was coming beforehand, and chose to go on a talk-show, make a campaign stop, or have a beer, instead of doing what every true American President in the history of our nation would have done. Obuma is not merely a disgrace to America and our Presidency, he is a disgrace to humanity and decency.