by John Hawkins
What’s the point of having a President who learns about everything his administration is doing from the newspapers, just like everyone else? When do you start to ask, “Is this guy stupid or just dishonest?” Given that Barack Obama seems to know so little about what’s going on in his administration that it’s starting to resemble a “Hogan’s Heroes” rerun with Obama playing the role of Colonel Klink, maybe the answer is “both.”
1) Obama didn’t know we were spying on German Chancellor Angela Merkel for five years.
The White House cut off some monitoring programs after learning of them, including the one tracking Ms. Merkel and some other world leaders, a senior U.S. official said. Other programs have been slated for termination but haven’t been phased out completely yet, officials said.
The account suggests President Barack Obama went nearly five years without knowing his own spies were bugging the phones of world leaders. Officials said the NSA has so many eavesdropping operations under way that it wouldn’t have been practical to brief him on all of them.
In the March 22 interview, Obama said: “There have been problems, you know. I heard on the news about this story that fast and furious, where allegedly guns were being run into Mexico and ATF knew about it but didn’t apprehend those who had sent it. Eric Holder has — the attorney general has been very clear that he knew nothing about this. We had assigned an IG, inspector general, to investigate it.”
3) Obama didn’t know the DOJ seized the AP’s phone records.
Press Secretary Jay Carney later added about the scandal, “We don’t have any independent knowledge … [Obama] found out about the news reports yesterday on the road.”
4) Obama didn’t know the IRS was targeting Tea Party groups.
During a press conference with British Prime Minister David Cameron on Monday, President Obama was asked about the IRS scandal. He responded, ”I first learned about it from the same news reports that I think most people learned about this. I think it was on Friday.”
5) Obama didn’t know the Healthcare.gov website was going to fail.
In an exclusive interview with Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius, CNN’s Dr. Sanjay Gupta asked when the President first learned about the considerable issues with the Obamacare website.
Sebelius responded that it was in “the first couple of days” after the site went live October 1.
“But not before that?” Gupta followed up.
To which Sebelius replied, “No, sir.”
Editor’s Note: While it is hard, if not impossible, to believe that the President learned about all these events watching the evening news, if it is true, then Obama is a massively incompetent executive. If the President truly was kept in the dark, why hasn’t he fired his chief of staff? Either the President is okay with not knowing anything, or he did know and he is simply hoping to escape responsibility by claiming he didn’t know. The latter seems the most probably explanation.
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John Hawkins writes two weekly columns for Townhall and a column for PJ Media. Additionally, his work has also been published at the Washington Examiner, The Hill, TPNN, Hot Air, The Huffington Post and at Human Events.