Cite?
Are you sure you know what the position of President actually entails? (hint: 'luci got it right)
I guess we should get that out of the way first.
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](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/President_of_the_United_States)
I don’t see anywhere in there that he has to know everything that every person on the government payroll is doing, nor do I see that he is personally responsible for every facet of government.
It’s true that in general a President is responsible for things that happen during his term, but it’s unreasonable, IMO, to hold a President accountable for something he had no knowledge of, unless it’s part of a larger pattern which would then possibly be indicative of ineptitude. Do you see this single incident that you’ve cited as somehow indicative of a larger pattern? What other incidents, in your opinion, comprise that pattern?
Well, how high a standard was Ronald Reagan held to? Or Richard Nixon? Note that in those cases actual crimes were committed, and at least in the case of Nixon, we know he was actively involved in the commission of crimes. Did they accept responsibility? Should they have?
They shift manager at McDonald’s is held accountable for the things that he is responsible for; he is not held accountable for things beyond his ken unless it was something he was supposed to know about. Are you arguing that as part of his job as POTUS, Obama was supposed to know about the details of this particular sting operation? If so, why do you think that? And, how was he supposed to know it was happening in the first place, in order to be able to know about it in-depth enough to exert control or be responsible for it? Do you think the POTUS should know details about all the hundreds or thousands or tens of thousands of criminal investigations that are on-going? I’ll mock you here by reminding you that his name is Barack Obama, not Brainiac Obama.
I eagerly await a cite for the assertion you made about CEOs taking responsibility, and for the answers to the questions posed in this and in my previous post.
It’s a job, not a point on a number line. Different jobs entail different responsibilities and different expectations. You can’t compare them with terms like “less” or “more”.
Okay, so the executive branch has NO one in charge, no one accountable for its performance? That’s a novel argument, gotta admit. But it does explain the dysfunction of government.
Good to know that the ATF is just running around doing whatever and the President doesn’t have to care. Not his problem.
I would think we’d all be able to agree that the ATF falls under the president’s responsibilities. if it doesn’t, then I’d love to know whose it does fall under. Can’t have rogue agencies with power of life and death yet no one accountable.
You’ve yet to explain how Obama is responsible for things he doesn’t know about, or how he’s supposed to find out which things he doesn’t know about which are important.
Do you expect him to call each and every employee of the federal government on a daily basis and ask them what’s up?
Adaher, your views on Presidential responsibility have undergone a remarkable evolution.
From a May 2003 thread on the stunning absence of WMD in Iraq.
When you say “he seems awfully uninterested”, what gives you that impression? Has he said “I am uninterested in finding out who has been leaking all these secrets”? Or did you form that impression from something else he said or did? Or did you form that impression based on things you didn’t see or hear?
The basic idea of how an organization works is not exactly complicated. Anything going on with the ATF would reach the President through the Attorney general and the head of the FBI. Fast and Furious was hatched in a meeting between high level Justice Department officials, including the Directors of the FBI and ATF:
Now, was the President not told because such an idea just isn’t important enough for him to be briefed on, or was he not told because such an idea is politically risky, and thus the President should be kept out of the loop?
In addition, Eric Holder was informed in July 2010, while it was still going on:
At this point, even if the President was never told, this is his appointee. many of the people in on the meeting that approved the operation were direct appointees of the President. Now I’m sure we can all agree that the President is directly responsible for his appointees’ actions.
It was May 2003. President Bush is not only responsible for the war in Iraq and the failure to find WMDs in significant quantities, but he was rightly held responsible by the public, along with his whole party. The Iraq war was a disaster for the political fortunes of the Republican Party, resulting directly in the 2006 shellacking they took, and it also resulted in GWB becoming a lame duck not too long after he was elected.
What you folks seem to be asking is that we overlook pretty much everything bad that’s ever happened on Obama’s watch and blame it on someone else. While giving him full credit for the good things that happened on his watch. I’m interested to know what the standard is here. I can see not blaming the president for the economy. that’s mostly beyond a President’s control and
the public still mostly blamed GWB. But things that his administration actually does are clearly his responsibility. When the EPA sets rules that directly cost jobs, he’s responsible for those lost jobs. The EPA is under his authority. When the ATF gets a border agent killed because of a botched gunrunning operation, that’s also an agency he’s in charge of. He can’t be responsible for the actions of SEAL Team Six and yet not responsible for the ATF. And no, he does not get to just choose what he will and won’t pay attention to and only be held responsible for what he chooses to pay attention to. His job description involves him using sound judgement to determine what he should directly involve himself in and what he should delegate to others. And those decisions appear to be motivated primarily by politics rather than by governing. Get in on the stuff that makes him look good, keep him away from stuff that might make him look bad. this is not unusual behavior in an administration, we saw the same type of thing happen with Bush and Abu Ghraib. But in the end, the public did not hold Bush blameless for Abu Ghraib and I doubt they’ll hold Obama blameless for what the ATF does closer to home.
AFAIK, you’ve only given us one bad thing that you hold him responsible for. I asked you if you saw this as part of a larger pattern, and if so, to describe that pattern. Thus far, you have not done that, and so “everything bad” amounts to one thing.
Exactly what are you talking about here?
This is the same item you’ve already listed as something you believe he should be responsible for, even though he did not know about it. It only counts once, no matter how many times you list it.
What is it about his decisions that make them appear to be “motivated primarily by politics rather than by governing”? What should he do differently, in your opinion, in order to appear to be motivated by governing?
You’re back to harping on the ATF thing. It still only counts as one thing.
So Holder knew an operation called Fast & Furious existed, but we don’t know what level of detail he knew. I presume you want to hold him responsible for not knowing something, but I hardly see how you can hold him responsible for the actions of others when he didn’t know what they were doing. Are you able to separate those two things, or is all responsibility just merged into one big pile?
Uh… yes, he was directly involved in the SEAL Team Six mission planning (remember, he opted for the invasion instead of a bomb strike? He opted for “fight your way out” instead of wait for diplomatic extraction? So, yes INDEED, he was directly responsible for the SEAL Team Six mission. I very much doubt that he was directly involved in one of the several hundred ATF missions that are running at any given time.
This makes no sense. Going back to the CEO thing, Obama would be the CEO of the parent company and ATF would be like a wholely owned subsidiary with it’s own CEO (called a Director). ATF runs hundreds of operations on a continual basis. Are you really saying that Obama should be personally involved in all of those operations? Perhaps he should also be personally approving all medications for the FDA and personally involved in all IRS investigations. Heck, in his spare time, maybe he could pop down and run the White House gift shop for a while.
Ummm… it was military NCOs who were prosecuted for Abu Ghraib, so not only did Bush not get held accountable, NOBODY in the whole chain of command was held accountable. They threw a couple lowly NCOs under the bus to take their punishment.
You know, if I don’t tell my boss about things that could end up having a major impact on the company, I get fired. Of course, in the government, the top priority is to protect the President, and that’s done by not telling him.
There is simply no world in which Fast and Furious isn’t important enough for the President to be apprised of it. It was important enough to involve the top law enforcement officers in the country and no one bothered to tell the president?
Given the foreign policy implications, there is just no way, unless there was an intent to keep the President out of the loop for his own protection.
Was the CEO of BP responsible for what happened on an oil rig not directly owned by BP?
I’m not asking for Obama to be impeached. I’m asking for him to be held politically accountable. And that doesn’t even mean he loses reelection. It just means that people acknowledge that when the administration he is in charge of does something stupid, that’s on him. Especially given that Fast and Furious wasn’t some merely local operation. It involved the head of the ATF and the FBI.
And guess who got fired for Fast and Furious? The whistleblower.
First: No, he was not held personally responsible. Find any quote that says the he, as an individual, should have know that they were SUB-CONTRACTING to companies with a record of faulty work? AND, the were prior documented cases of that same company screwing up that same kind of work. AND, that the specific valve used was not adequate. So please show me where he was held personally accountable. He stepped down because it was politically expedient to quell the angry masses. But that is not the same as being held personally responsible.
Second: A SUB-CONTRACTOR is not the same as a wholly owned subsidiary with it’s own management structure.
Did you even read the article that I linked? It is a bit more recent than your information sources.
Had that agent not been killed, no one would have ever heard of the operation. It was a fairly standard operation involving one local area.
Exactly WHAT foreign policy implications? Our ATF and other agencies have worked with Mexican authorities for a very, very long time. Mexico didn’t just suddenly move in down there. The US didn’t suddenly start tossing 2000 weapons over their boarder each day. Both countries want the weapons trafficking stopped. Do you think Mexico would declare war on the US because of gun walking from a few gun shops in a single city? Especially in light of the fact that we were probably passing them the serial numbers so that they could identify the trafficking routes?
The Mexican government was deliberately kept out of the loop. Am I to believe that low level ATF people, on their own, made such a consequential diplomatic decision?
Furthermore, the Mexican government has not received an apology for the US government’s conduct:
Marisela Morales, Mexico’s attorney general and a longtime favorite of American law enforcement agents in Mexico, told The Times that she first learned about Fast and Furious from news reports. And to this day, she said, U.S. officials have not briefed her on the operation gone awry, nor have they apologized.
“At no time did we know or were we made aware that there might have been arms trafficking permitted,” Morales, Mexico’s highest-ranking law enforcement official, said in a recent interview. “In no way would we have allowed it, because it is an attack on the safety of Mexicans.”
Morales said she did not want to draw conclusions before the outcome of U.S. investigations, but that deliberately letting weapons “walk” into Mexico — with the intention of tracing the guns to drug cartels — would represent a “betrayal” of a country enduring a drug war that has killed more than 40,000 people. U.S. agents lost track of hundreds of weapons under the program.
Call me crazy, but this seems like the kind of thing the President’s appointees would want to make the President aware of. Why do they still have their jobs?
First, this article contains lots of “ifs” and “mights”. More up-to-date information shows that the situation was more complicated than the article makes out.
Why does who still have their job? Most of the people involved DO NOT still have their jobs. Robert Mueller does, presumably because he is very good at being the head of the FBI, despite this operation. After all, he is a Bush appointee that Obama kept on the job, and he has currently been head of the FBI for 11 years. And Eric Holder still has his job because he didn’t know about the gun walking, and because once he found out about it, he took steps to shut down the operation and put policies in place to prevent the tactic from being used again, and because the President felt that the pressure brought to bear on members of Congress to vote to convict Holder of contempt was out of line (more on that below).
You seem to be unaware of this quote:
That’s from a 23 March 2011 appearance on Univision, where he also that neither he nor Attorney General Holder authorized Fast and Furious. Gun-walking was not a new tactic, nor was it something that was implemented by the Obama administration. In fact, it dates back to 2006 (and the Bush administration).
adaher, I knew very little about the F&F Op before tonight. However, it didn’t take long for me to see that a) it was a tactic that agents had begun using, with approval, during the Bush admin, b) the field offices and AZ Atty Gen. offices didn’t fully inform their superiors of the details of their operations, c) once it was brought to light, Atty. Gen. Holder did in fact move to stop and prevent such operations, all while denouncing the tactic. Despite this, he was charged with criminal & civil contempt of Congress (both votes were in favor of the charges). Despite this, the President chose to keep him as Atty. Gen., recognizing that the charges and the vote were more complex than they might have seemed:
Agents involved were re-assigned, fired or resigned.
Mexican officials were kept out of the loop because they were not trusted because of things like this:
Despite the outrage expressed by some,
All of this is from ATF gunwalking scandal - Wikipedia . The vast majority of it is cited. In a few short hours, I appear to have learned a great deal more about F&F than you appear to know, and the reality is that people have been held accountable, including an Atty. Gen. who didn’t know anything about it. If you still think the President should be held accountable, I guess you’ll also have to admit that since, as you pointed out, the POTUS works for the American people, every citizen should be held responsible, even tho none of us knew anything about what was going on. What should be the penalty we 300 million or so citizens should face?