Well, So Much for Knowing 'More Than Those Who are Briefing Him'

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.

“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.

In lieu of an Allahpundit-esque exit question, allow me to point you to the headline of Walter Russell Mead’s latest essay.