Obama Skips Briefing Following Ambassador’s Assassination
Is anyone surprised by this revelation? Our Commander Campaigner-in-Chief has made his priorities crystal clear:
How long had it been since President Obama attended his daily intelligence meeting in the lead-up to the Sept. 11 attacks on U.S. diplomatic facilities in Egypt and Libya? After all, our adversaries are known to use the anniversary of 9/11 to target the United States. According to the public schedule of the president, the last time the Obama attended his daily intelligence meeting was Sept. 5 — a week before Islamist radicals stormed our embassy in Cairo and terrorists killed our ambassador to Tripoli. The president was scheduled to hold the intelligence meeting at 10:50 a.m. Wednesday, the day after the attacks, but it was canceled so that he could comfort grieving employees at the State Department — as well he should. But instead of rescheduling the intelligence briefing for later in the day, Obama apparently chose to skip it altogether and attend a Las Vegas fundraiser for his re-election campaign. One day after a terrorist attack.
On Monday the same Washington Post columnist, Marc Thiessen, reported that the president has missed 62 percent of his daily in-person intel briefings in 2011 and 2012. President Bush almost never missed a briefing after 9/11. I recognize that a president’s schedule is extremely demanding, especially in the teeth of a campaign, so passing on these meetings occasionally would be understandable. I cannot, however, fathom how the president could justify canceling and not re-scheduling his intelligence briefing the day after an active US Ambassador was murdered in the line of duty, and as an international crisis continues to spread. The White House offers a two-fold defense on this: First, make snide remarks about President Bush, then insist that Obama is so sophisticated that he doesn’t need experts to brief him: