From the Daily Caller yesterday:
First Lady Michelle Obama is back on the fund-raising circuit and she’s painting a very flattering picture of her hubby.
“See, what you all need to know about the President you helped to elect is that when it comes to the people he meets, Barack has a memory like a steel trap,” she told her eager audience at a sold-out breakfast fund-raiser at the Claremont Hotel in Berkeley, Calif., on June 14.
Advertisement“He has a gift in that way, able to retain information, know more than those who are briefing him, asking critical questions, because all of those wins and losses are not wins and losses for him [but] they are wins and losses for the folks whose stories he carries with him, the folks that he worries about and prays about before he goes to bed at night,” she said, according to a White House transcript of the speech.
Well, so much for that idea: “NYT: Obama overruled top Pentagon, DOJ lawyers on Libya war powers,” Allahpundit writes at Hot Air:
The Times is treating it as the major story that it is, but under a Republican president (especially one named, say, George Bush) it would be a scandal of nuclear proportions. What they’re basically saying here, without actually saying it, is that the president’s own lawyers told him that the Libya war is illegal and he responded by looking around for other lawyers who’d tell him what he wanted to hear.
As Allahpundit writes, “This time, because he almost certainly knew that they’d tell him that he was in violation, he bypassed the normal procedures to avoid a binding ruling and treated the [Office of Legal Counsel] as if it was just one lawyer among many. He rigged the game because he knew what the probable outcome would be if he didn’t. Disgraceful.”
“The congressional hearings began on Monday, I hope,” he adds.
Related: “The Definitive Scandal: ‘Gunwalker’ Much Worse Than ‘Iran-Contra.’”
In lieu of an Allahpundit-esque exit question, allow me to point you to the headline of Walter Russell Mead’s latest essay.
Can this presidency be saved? Hell, I was gonna suggest a living will be drawn up with a DNR. ASAP.
So, if I read this right, Ms. Obama is trying say the Chief Executive is brilliant. Well, here’s the thing about “brilliance”–if you have it, it manifests it self somehow in acts that can be observed in the real world. For example, Bill Clinton had a political brilliance, and that made itself apparent to all (even if one did not care for the application of that brilliance).
Other than getting rising in the liberal “meritocratic” ranks, and becoming President in an election year that had a lot of wind behind his back, I’m not sure what the heck Barack Obama has ever done. Seems to me the man is not brilliant, but merely precocious–and that he never was challenged enough to advance beyond that stage, so he’s still just precocious.
“memory like a steel trap”
Can he remember all the things he has promised, starting with closing Guantanamo, lowering unemployment, etc, etc? This steel trap has less endurance than a post-it note.
Rusty, dangerous to use, and outlawed for its cruelty.