Saturday, October 13, 2012

A Disembodied and Wraithlike Presidency

If one accepts the current administration's disclaimers of responsibility for any any all untoward occurrences and situations, the nation is experiencing, with Barack Obama, its first spectral president. 

After almost a full term in the White House, the nation and its people seem to have become inured to Mr. Obama continually blaming widespread unemployment and the dismal state of the economy on his predecessor even though things have continued to deteriorate throughout his tenure. None of that has anything to do with him.

But that's only the beginning of the cascading disavowals of responsibility from the White House for anything and everything that has gone or is going wrong.

A politicized and racist Justice Department -- responsible for (i) dropping prosecution of truncheon wielding New Black Panther Party thugs for trying to intimidate voters, (ii) consistently ignoring hate crimes committed  by members of minority groups, and (iii) thwarting investigations into its running lethal weapons to Mexican drug cartels -- seems to exist as an an organization independent, rather than as part of the administration.  Isn't it part of the government's executive branch that the president heads and for which he is responsible?

Now we have the murderous terrorist attack on our consulate in Libya demonstrating the failure and collapse of Obama's weak foreign policy initiatives . . . and the the administration -- up to and including the vice president and the president's own spokesmen --  is blaming the intelligence community and the State Department for having failed to adequately defend the facility and our people there and then for their own dissembling statements about what transpired.  Are we supposed to believe that the nation's intelligence agencies and the State Department are detached from and independent of the executive branch of the government that the president supposedly leads?

During Harry Truman's day the buck stopped with and was accepted by the President.  What an old fashioned idea.  

We now have a glib apparition in the oval office that is detached from the consequences of its ineptitude and shortcomings. 



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