I don’t expect a direct line to every employee, so much as to not be incredibly ignorant of what’s going on in cases where he should know. It’s not as if employees were doing things and no one else knew.
IRS- before it became public, WH officials knew about the issue but never told the President. No one was fired for failure to inform the President.
VA- VA whistleblowers tried to inform the administration of problems and found that the normal chain of command was broken. They went to Congress, and some Republican Congressmen informed the administration in writing of the problems in the VA. They were ignored.
ACA website- The President was unaware that current IT procurement policies are outdated and unsuitable for the scale of the project that was being undertaken. After the fact, the President knew this.
Stimulus- The President was unaware that federal red tape makes “shovel ready” projects more theory than reality. He admitted long after that shovel ready wasn’t what he thought it was.
FOIA- This administration stonewalls FOIA requests worse than any previous administration. No one has bothered to ask the President if this is his own policy, because they know the answer they’d get. “Wha? Really? I had no idea!”
These are all examples of ignorance germane to the job he was doing. And his attitude has always been casual when it comes to these types of issues. “Not my fault”, or “Yeah, it failed because of this problem that people who pay attention to this stuff have known for decades, but I wasn’t interested in boring details like that.”
Still don’t understand what the hell his tweet was trying to say. And don’t understand what it is you’re saying in Trump’s defense. Are you saying that Obama said he has no idea what was going on in government? When? Please post a cite.
And how can you say Obama thinks ignorance is a virtue when he explicitly says-- right there in the quote you fucking quoted-- that ignorance is NOT a virtue. Lemme ask you, adaher: Do you have a sentient hairpiece?
The President thinks ignorance is a virtue to the extent that it absolves him of responsibility when things go wrong.
That’s what I think Trump was referring to, that Obama’s continued ignorance about what is going on in his own administration has been the source of most of his problems.
What ignorance of what is going on in his own administration? Like, he doesn’t know that the Head of Homeland Security doesn’t wash his hands after using the restroom? Or that the HUD director’s secretary’s typist watches porn during company time? And since he doesn’t know about these things, he thinks ignorance is a virtue?
He said ignorance is not a virtue. Even if he was ignorant of some aspect of what was going on in his administration, that doesn’t mean the President thinks it’s a virtue. That is some pretty tasty pretzel logic you have going on there, friend.
How about a cite for each one of those? By now you must realize that you will be challenged every time you make a factual assertion about Obama without a cite, since you’re so often wrong.
This whole line of argument is fucking idiotic, even for you (and that’s saying something). At least you put it in the proper thread. Stupid Republican idea indeed.
That’s a good comeback, but there is a feature here: Trump will never seek to pass the buck. He is the master of all he surveys in his mind, and if something goes wrong in his administration, heads are going to roll.
Lack of accountability and intentional ignorance aren’t just virtues to Obama, that’s just how politicians think. Obama’s just been less artful in his avoidance strategy.
Of course he’ll pass the freakin’ buck. The buck won’t stop at his desk; For every fuckup he makes, he’ll ALWAYS find some subordinate to blame.
His business model is to fuck up the company, declare bankruptcy and let the creditors take pennies on the dollar. For God’s sake, he’s already proposed just that solution to the countries debt!
That’s how leadership works. You find out who messed up, you deal with the problem. Politicians just say, “Oh, I had no idea” yet the person who did know rarely gets fired or even reprimanded.
A leader is only directly responsible for his own policies and actions. If subordinates go rogue, they get fired or corrected(we used to call it ‘coach and counsel’) If no one is fired, if no corrections to procedure are made, then a leader tacitly accepts that it was totally, 100% on him.
Anyway, the media and people not halfway up Obama’s ass did actually hold him responsible for all of his administration’s actions. That’s the way our system works. The President is the only elected official in the executive branch and all the executive power is in his person. The buck stops with him. If you don’t like it, change it. Direct election of cabinet officials. Then they can be the ones held accountable by voters.
He won’t say that, because that’s a stupid, ignorant thing to say. He’ll say, “The problem has been dealt with. It won’t happen again.”
Now I’m not going to make grand claims about Trump’s competence. By all accounts he’s at best a middling leader, maybe not even that good. Romney was a vastly superior leader and proved it both in business and in government. For all I know, Trump could be totally incompetent. But he doesn’t talk the language of incompetence that Obama is so fluent in. In Donald Trump’s world, “I don’t know” subjects one to ridicule and makes people stop taking you seriously. The only exception is if “I don’t know” is followed directly by “I’ll find out”. Obama seems strangely incurious about that too.
That’s kinda the point. Even if a leader fires someone, he’s still responsible for his judgment in hiring that person. A leader is responsible for everything down the chain of command. The actions of the lowliest grunt reflect badly on the general. And speaking of that, didn’t we all agree that GWB was responsible for Abu Ghraib even though the perpetrators had the rank “PFC” in front of some of their names? If a President is responsible for the actions of a Private First Class halfway around the world, I think we can agree that a President is responsible for the actions of a high ranking IRS official in DC.