During today’s White House press briefing, Obama spokesmodel Jay Carney trotted out an old line to excuse a new scandal. Carney told the assembled media that they told the president what is going on in his own administration.
CNN’s Jim Acosta asked Carney when President Obama first learned about the secret wait list and other problems — which have resulted in the deaths of some military veterans — in the Veterans Administration.
Carney replied, “You mean the specific allegations that I think were reported first by your network out of Phoenix, I believe we learned about them first through your reports. I will double check if that’s not the case, but that’s when we learned about them and that’s when, as I understand, Secretary Shinseki learned about them and immediately took the action he has taken, including instigating his review — or initiating his own review, but also requesting that the inspector general investigate, and I think, again, I would point you to his testimony as well as the inspector general’s testimony last week.”
That isn’t true.
Barack Obama was told about the problems shortly after he was elected president. He has done nothing about them for six years.
If Americans are going to judge Obama’s lack of effort to help our sick veterans by his own 2008 campaign claims, Barack Obama is not patriotic. On the next page is video of a speech from May 12, 2008 — a speech in which Barack Obama declared that mistreatment of our veterans is a “betrayal.”
For the VA scandal, Obama and his team couldn’t even bestir themselves to come up with a new excuse. They just trotted out the “he learned about it from watching the news” line that they have used and abused in past scandals.
· Associated Press: Obama Learned Of IRS Targeting From News Reports: Aide
· Real Clear Politics: Carney: Obama Didn’t Know About Fast & Furious Until He Saw It In Media
· USA Today: NSA Denies Obama Knew Of Spying On German Leader
· CNN: HHS Chief: President Didn’t Know Of Obamacare Website Woes Beforehand
· Business Insider: The White House Says It Had No Idea The DOJ Seized The AP’s Phone Records
What does Barack Obama do with himself all day?
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