Pirate's Cove

Those who’ve read my blog posts know that I always refer to him as Obama or (NMP) Obama (not my president). When I refer to Obama as President Obama I do it to make a point. Case in point, per this McClatchy article at the Raleigh News and Observer

With Obama in the dark, administration planned how to stage-manage news of IRS scandal

Weeks before the world – and apparently President Barack Obama himself – heard about the details of the Internal Revenue Service scandal, top people in his administration started planning how to stage-manage the release of the information.

Senior aides in the White House, the Treasury Department and the IRS debated the best way to tell the public what surely would ignite a storm of criticism, the coming report that the IRS earlier had targeted conservative groups for extra scrutiny. The plan eventually chosen: the “incredibly bad idea” of secretly planting a question in the audience when an IRS official spoke on May 10. (snip)

While White House officials insisted that aides and advisers deliberately kept Obama in the dark about the coming report, they said they and the Treasury Department started debating the best way to inform the country.

And, as we all know, President Obama stated that he first heard about this from watching the news. Now,I dearly love how McClatchy simply takes this all for granted, forgoing any sort of investigative journalism, but, then, perhaps Obama really was kept in the dark.

Which begs a question: why are any of these people, at least at the senior officer position, still employed? In any company in the world, if senior underlings engaged in this behavior they would have already been “promoted to customer”, as we say in the sales world. The same applies to most governments in the world. No leader, especially a head of a company or a government, wants to be bushwacked by a scandal, especially in politics. They always want to get ahead of the game so they can be prepared. Certainly, if the story makes it the White House chief of staff, this is something that President Obama needed to know. Why didn’t he?

Conversely, this could be the exact thing Obama wants, either because he has a stated policy or because this is the atmosphere he creates, namely that no one tells him about Bad Things. Which shows a dereliction of duty and an unwillingness to be President. It would validate what Conservatives have said for a long time, that “Obama likes to BE president; he doesn’t like to DO president.” Any leader who created an atmosphere or told his underlings “don’t tell me” would be terminated along with the underlings.

Of course, in order to cover what is sheer incompetence and what are surely mule fritters talking points (we all know that no one withheld this from Obama, he surely knew, at least back in April), we get talking points from various Obama sycophants

(USA Today) “Some matters are not appropriate to convey to him, and this is one of them,” spokesman Jay Carney said.

“You do not intervene in an independent investigation,” Carney said. “There was nothing we could have or should have done about it.”

(Fox News) Pfeiffer defended Obama’s statement that he didn’t know anything about the incidents or the investigation until he heard about them in the press.

“No president would get involved in an independent IRS investigation,” Pfeiffer said. “It would be wholly inappropriate.”

That’s cute, where they conflate being informed with “getting involved”. Obama didn’t seem to have a problem yapping his mouth, getting involved, when it came to the Trayvon Martin situation, arrest of Henry Louis Gates Jr. (saying the Boston PD “acted stupidly” and his beer summit), and a host of other issues.

But, I’ll say it again: if President Obama, the guy whose desk the buck is supposed to stop at, is being kept in the dark by “employees”, why are they still employed? The answer to that question should tell us that Obama knew.

Crossed at Right Wing News and Stop The ACLU.