“Hey, don’t look at me – I’m just the president!”
That’s the common thread in President Obama’s response to his recent scandal eruptions, from IRS harassment of tea partiers to his Justice Department’s spying on AP reporters. Like everybody else, Obama learns about these things via cable news, according to press secretary Jay Carney.
Obama’s flight from responsibility punctured the stratosphere in his recent speech on “the Future of Our Fight against Terrorism” at the National Defense University in D.C. In the speech Obama seemed to position himself as the loyal opposition to his own administration.
He worried that “perpetual war … will prove self-defeating, and alter our country in troubling ways.” Look at the current situation at Guantanamo Bay, Citizen Obama chided, “where we are force-feeding detainees who are being held on a hunger strike … Is this who we are? Is that something our founders foresaw?”
Obama pronounced himself “troubled” by the proliferation of drone strikes in an ever-expanding war and “the possibility that leak investigations may chill the investigative journalism that holds government accountable.”