[RC] BHO as a "scholar"

[BILROJ via Centroids: The Center of the Radical Centrist Community]

Not exactly a surprise, is it?  BHO was on the faculty of a leading  
university,
the University of Illinois, with not even one scholarly paper to his  
credit.
Why not?  Well, he isn't a scholar, that's why.  His  vaunted  brainpower,
in other words, is all sham. 
 
The point is not that every politician needs to be a scholar. No-one says  
so.
However, in Obama's case there was all that pretense in 2008, which  
continued
well into 2012, and sometimes still exists among his acolytes. 
 
Among actual scholars there is the factor:  Hey, I  have a decent 
publications record
and I can't get a job at the University of Illinois. How did Obama get  his 
job?
Could it be because he is black and a sweetheart of the political  Left?
Nah, that isn't possible, is it?  (wink, wink)
 
To repeat a sentiment made explicit before, the whole system stinks
and needs to be replaced.  The Republicans aren't much (or even any)  
better.
And for one I am sick of it.
 
Billy
 
 
 
 
When a President Learns Everything on TV
 
_Jonathan S. Tobin_ 
(http://www.commentarymagazine.com/author/jonathan-s-tobin/)  | 
_@tobincommentary_ (http://twitter.com/tobincommentary)  05.20.2014 


 
Today, White House Press Secretary Jay Carney sought to partially walk back 
 _his statement yesterday_ 
(http://www.whitehouse.gov/the-press-office/2014/05/19/press-briefing-press-secretary-jay-carney-5192014)
  in which he said  
President Obama learned about the growing scandal at the Veterans 
Administration  by watching a report on the topic on CNN. After realizing just 
how 
bad that  sounded, Carney returned to the daily briefing with the White House 
press corps  today to say that his statement was being misinterpreted. 
According to Carney,  what he really meant to say was that the president had 
only 
heard of the  “specific allegations” about misconduct at VA hospitals by 
watching television.  But, he insisted, the president was aware of problems 
at the VA, as proved by  statements he had made during his 2008 presidential 
campaign when he promised to  fix the agency. 
Which is to say that, yes, Barack Obama had heard of the VA and had some  
vague intention to improve it as part of an effort to pose as someone who 
cares  about our nation’s veterans. But between his arrival in the Oval Office 
and his  subsequent appointment of retired Army General Eric Shinseki to 
head the VA in  2009 and the moment when he stumbled into awareness about the 
scandal during the  course of spending some quality time with his remote 
control, he hadn’t given  the topic much, if any, thought. 
The administration’s problem here is not just that the VA scandal is far 
more  serious than even Carney is currently willing to admit and that any 
action it is  currently taking to address the plague of mismanagement and 
corruption that may  have cost the lives of at least 40 veterans while they 
awaited treatment is too  little and too late. _As I noted last week_ 
(http://www.commentarymagazine.com/2014/05/16/absentee-president-is-bad-for-veterans-heal
th-and-the-countrys/) , having an absentee  president is bad for both the 
health of veterans and the nation. The president  may have gotten away with 
treating the IRS scandal as no big deal and questions  about Benghazi as 
merely a Republican witch hunt. But the spectacle of  widespread corruption at 
the heart of a government health-care system that led  to the deaths of 
veterans is not one you can pass off as a product of the  fevered imaginations 
of 
his opponents. That’s especially true when you consider  that Rep. Jeff 
Miller, the chair of the House Veterans Affairs Committee, _wrote specifically 
to the president a year  ago_ 
(http://veterans.house.gov/sites/republicans.veterans.house.gov/files/2013_5_21_CJM%20to%20President%20Obama%20re%20VA%20Qu
ality%20of%20Care%20failures.pdf)  to bring to his attention what was 
already believed to be a widespread  problem involving inefficiency and 
deceptive 
practices. 
The fact that the White House resorted to what has become its standard  
second-term excuse for government scandal with a line about the president  
hearing about it on TV or by reading the newspapers raises serious questions  
about both his leadership and the intelligence of his staff. After all, surely 
 it must have occurred to someone at the White House that using the same 
excuse  about hearing of it in the media wasn’t likely to work after it had 
been  employed with little success to distance him from the IRS and other 
scandals.  Such intellectual laziness speaks to a West Wing that is both 
collapsing from  intellectual fatigue as well as having acquired an almost 
complete 
contempt for  both the press and public opinion. 
The consequences here aren’t limited to the growing credibility gap that 
this  administration continues to build. It’s bad enough that no one—not even 
his most  ardent supporters—really believe that the president is on top of 
these issues.  But what really stings is that Carney and the rest of the 
inhabitants of the  Obama echo chamber have really come to believe that no one 
cares whether they  are telling the truth or not. 
Just as important is the reality of a government that is out of the control 
 of its leader. A year ago Miller noted that one of the chief problems at 
the VA  was a lack of accountability. That’s still true of the agency, as the 
deaths of  veterans has provoked a low-key administration response that has 
left Secretary  Shinseki in charge of a problem that grew worse on his 
watch. But it is also  true of President Obama. 
While no president can micromanage every Cabinet department, if Obama 
really  did care about veterans, how is it that in the years between his first 
use of  the issue as a campaign tactic and the moment when it exploded in the 
media he  managed never to do a thing about the issue, even when 
specifically warned about  the “allegations” that Carney claims he didn’t know 
about? 
The lack of confidence in government is a natural response to events like 
the  VA scandal, but it is compounded by a presidential response that makes 
it clear  that Obama doesn’t pay much attention to the issues he raised in 
his own  campaigns and that he is slow to act even after learning about such 
disasters on  television. This scandal makes it clear, if it hadn’t already 
been so, that the  Obama administration has run out of steam, ideas, or even 
a willingness to  pretend that it cares about public opinion. It’s going to 
be a long slog until  January 2017.

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