I've always thought of Barack Obama as the "Chauncey Gardiner" of American politics. Like Peter Sellers' character in the classic film, "Being There," Obama is an embodiment of outsiders' hopes and dreams for who they think he is. Reality, like the film, shows there isn't really a lot of there, there.
This weekend, we learned that President Obama "didn't know about" NSA spying on world leaders, especially German Chancellor Angela Merkel. He also "didn't know about" the posthumously obvious problems with the rollout of the ObamaCare website exchanges.According to the New York Times, these problems were evident eight months ago. Yet, it seems, they never made it to the President's desk.
President Obama was also completely unaware that the IRS was subjecting conservative organizations to undue scrutiny on their tax-exempt applications. At the time of the alleged targeting, the IRS Commissioner visited the White House more than almost any other federal official, but, apparently, never disclosed his agency's targeting of political opponents of Obama.
President Obama also, presumably, was unaware of the Justice Department's program to allow Mexican drug gangs to purchase military-grade arms from the US. Those arms have been used to murder thousands of Mexicans and at least two US border patrol officers.
President Obama also, apparently, didn't know that his spy agencies were monitoring millions of phone calls and cataloguing billions of web visits and data transfers. He, it is reported, didn't know that these same agencies were also recording phone calls in foreign countries.
