Wednesday, September 12, 2012

Obama and Daily Intelligence Briefings

Obama is an awful president when it comes to domestic policy.

He's also awful when it comes to foreign policy.

Question: Is Obama a worse president than Jimmy Carter?

From The Foundry, Heritage Foundation:

According to an article in The Washington Post by opinion writer Marc Thiessen, President Obama isn’t attending his daily intelligence briefings all that often.

In fact, Thiessen asserts that the President is missing more than half his daily intelligence briefings, attending only around 38 percent of his Presidential Daily Brief (PDB) intelligence sessions during 2011 and through mid-2012.

If true, that’s really troubling.

It’s not like there aren’t any high priority national security matters the Commander in Chief needs to get briefed on, right? By many accounts, the world is on fire and American interests are threatened in a whole raft of places around the globe.

Wouldn’t it be nice to know that the President is keeping up on how the fight in Afghanistan is going, where 60,000 brave Americans are fighting the likes of the Taliban, Haqqani Network, and al-Qaeda?

...And it’s not like missing intelligence briefings is standard practice for an American President. Thiessen writes: “By contrast, Obama’s predecessor, George W. Bush, almost never missed his daily intelligence meeting.”

Not surprisingly, the White House refutes Thiessen’s concerns, which are based on an investigation conducted by the Government Accountability Institute.

According to the article, the National Security Council (NSC) didn’t seem to think the President missing a briefing—or briefings—was all that important as Obama is reported to read the PDB daily even if he didn’t meet with the intelligence briefers.

But Thiessen makes a good point that the PDB document and the staff briefing complement one another. It gives the President an opportunity to discuss the PDB’s contents, get background information, and ask what might happen next.

It is utterly unacceptable for Obama to put the PDBs on the back burner while finding time to play 104 rounds of golf as president.

We know Obama has failed our country when it comes to the economy.

It's scary to think all that we don't know when it comes to how badly he has failed on the world stage.

Obama himself probably doesn't even know. He's not going to the briefings.

You can be sure Mitt Romney wouldn't blow off the PDBs.

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