No, I’m blaming him for the NSA’s incompetent and often illegal enforcement of the Patriot Act.
Again, you act as if the President is legislator-in-chief. Hey, it wasn’t passed while he was in office, so it doesn’t matter how he carries the law out!
Again with the, “The President isn’t responsible for what goes on in his own administration.”
I guess he’s not even responsible for misleading Congress and the public. He either lied, or was ignorant and should have not been talking about things he doesn’t understand.
I see we’re also still arguing for an independent, unaccountable, unelected bureacracy as our lords and masters.
Stop fucking twisting what I said. I never said he wasn’t responsible. That article is about mistakes the NSA has made. There’s nothing to suggest Obama’s involvement in enforcing an Act that was the darling of the right-wing. And if it’s illegal, it’s the doing of the GOP in getting it passed in the first place. Not so much fun when the shoe starts kicking your own ass, is it?
Quote where Obama lied to the public or Congress. Proven lies, not your own made-up shit.
There’s nothing in that article that says what you claim.
He told Congress that there are protections in place to make sure everything is done in accordance to the law. He also said that Congress had been kept fully informed.
Both were not true.
And of course there’s this laughably untrue statement:
Barack Obama says the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court ‘is transparent’
Rose: “So I hear you saying I have no problem with what NSA has been doing.”
Obama: “Well, let me finish, because I don’t. … (The FBI has) to go to the FISA court with probable cause and ask for a warrant.”
Rose: “But has FISA court turned down any request?”
Obama: “First of all, Charlie, the number of requests are surprisingly small, number one. Number two – folks don’t go with a query unless they’ve got a pretty good suspicion.”
Rose: “Should this be transparent in some way?”
Obama: “It is transparent, that’s why we set up the FISA court. The whole point of my concern before I was president – because some people say well, Obama was this raving liberal before, now he’s Dick Cheney. Dick Cheney sometimes says, ‘Yes, you know, he took it all, lock stock and barrel.’ My concern has always been not that we shouldn’t do intelligence gathering to prevent terrorism but rather are we setting up a system of checks and balances?”
And finally, when he claimed that Congress was providing oversight:
Congress was actually being denied access. Was that in the Patriot Act? Or was it in violation of said Patriot Act? And we’re talking about dealings with Congress here. This is not something the President can claim to not be responsible for. Agencies do not decide on their own that they won’t cooperate with Congress.
So an internal audit found mistakes. Internal means it was entirely within the Agency.
Just because there are protections doesn’t mean they’re invulnerable. Hence what the audit found.
Prove Obama was withholding information rather than not being told.
You give Reagan a pass for being lazy and not caring to know what’s happening on his watch yet Obama is supposed to be psychic and know what every single employee of the federal government is doing.
Maybe they don’t have the required clearances?
At least Obama still goes through the Court, Bush just ignored it completely.
They have to vote on the program, so they need the clearances. And I’m perfectly willing to accept that Obama didn’t know. He doesn’t seem to know nuthin’ about nuthin’ lately. He’s a figurehead.
If that’s the kind of thing you like, Warren is your candidate. Someone who won’t make any effort to run the government, and won’t even be particularly interested in finding anything out.
Yep. Consistently entertaining. It’s like watching a Martian try to analyze our mating rituals through a Google translator.
More evidence that competence matters:
Half the deadlines missed. This was predicted of course, and laughed off by most supporters of the law. So I’m eager to hear the next ad hoc excuse for why this doesn’t reflect badly on the President’s competence.
Reince Priebus must go.
RNC Spokesman Mistakenly Confirmed ‘Racist’ Priebus Quote
Remember, it does not matter whether Priebus used the term or not. What matters is that Reince Priebus is not a true leader, because he does not control every utterance and action of every person in the Republican Party hierarchy. This is intolerable. He is responsible for every thing that ever happens. If any gaffes are made, they reflect on Priebus’ competence and he must do the right thing and step down immediately.
And so must the next RNC chair and the one after that and the one after that and the one after that and…
The head of the RNC head has little authority, first off, and secondly, I never said that Obama should step down. Only that he sucks at his job and we should learn from that when evaluating future candidates.
Finally, everyone makes mistakes. There isn’t a great historical figure alive who hasn’t made a great blunder. What separates the great from the pretenders is that the great ones took responsibility for their blunders rather than pointing the finger. And because they were awesome, they could survive such blunders.
Obama’s supporters prove what a crappy leader he is by always needing to defend him on every single criticism that actually cuts(as opposed to the mild criticisms of him from the left), because he’s not strong enough to survive a few cuts. And he himself proves what a bad leader he is by always blaming someone else when something goes wrong. During the campaign, he blamed his staff 17 times for mistakes his campaign made. And the weekly stories of administration foul-ups? Always someone else’s fault.
Either Obama is the hardest luck President in history, beset by incompetence wherever he turns, or the problem is at the top.
At this point, Obama’s job approval is 99% the man as symbol, not the man as head of the executive branch:
http://pollingreport.com/obama_ad.htm
If Liz Warren had these approval ratings for actual job performance, issue by issue, she’d be around 35%. And we know she would be this bad, because she has exactly the same experience as Obama, as in none other than being an academic.
I think it far more likely that if Warren had the same approval ratings as Obama, then she would have the same approval ratings as Obama.
Well, except for that job Obama’s held for the last four and a half years, after one and a half Senate terms and a few in the Illinois state Senate. On the other hand, there’s all the Washington insider work Warren did to create the CPFB, after a considerable period of activism.
If your guys hadn’t pulled their automatic filibuster shit, she’d be directing the CPFB instead of sitting alongside them in the Senate now - as a member of the majority.
Silly little facts, never let them get in the way of a good partisan rant, eh what? 
If she had such ratings for her handling of various issues, especially that 35% rating for handling the economy(which BTW isn’t actually something the President is accountable for, which shows how screwed up political discourse is), then she’d probably have a… 35% approval rating.
Obama gets bonus points for being Obama.
Has he improved in the last four and a half years, or responded to his inadequacy by growing even more insular? According to what I’ve read, he’s become more and more isolated, listening only to a few close Chicago advisors. And he’s obviously reading some blogs, because he adopts their talking points on occasion in a rather amusing and pathetic way.
The New Yorker today published a fairly long article detailing what real leadership looks like: a look at Michael Bloomberg’s three terms as mayor. I don’t like a lot of his initiatives, but his ability to govern effectively is indisputable. Furthermore, he makes precisely the same arguments I’ve been making about why Obama is failing.
Most notably, his screwups are HIS, not his staff’s, not someone in the bureaucracy. He knows what’s going on and he takes responsibility for it.