Submitted by Darren Smith, Weekend Contributor
“I should have anticipated the optics.”
–President Barack Obama
President Obama claimed in an interview with NBC’s Meet the Press that he regretted playing a round of golf immediately following a press conference in which he spoke of the murder of captured Journalist James Foley by ISIS terrorists. This comes after weeks in some media circles of condemnation for showing lack of sincerity and being aloof to what had taken place.
The president stated that he “had to hold back tears” when speaking to the family of Mr. Foley but added that there was the possibility of a “jarring contrast” between world events and his desire to carve out a semblance of a normal life involving recreation.
The president also admitted that sometimes his own performance in some of the more public rituals of the presidency was lacking.
“Part of this job, is also the theater of it.
“It’s not something that always comes naturally to me. But it matters. And I’m mindful of that,” Obama said.
President Obama’s statements are surely not going to temper anger in the minds of those who were affronted by his remarks. It could be asked if his regret was whether he might have upset the family and those who knew and loved Mr. Foley or if his own image might have been tarnished.
One has to wonder how much else is theater with proffered claims of sincerity.
By Darren Smith
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It seems to me that people want this president to be washing his hands over every tragedy and not have any downtime. You don’t want your surgeon to cry over every surgery that goes wrong or when a patient dies. You don’t want him to go from surgery to surgery to surgery without taking a break to restore himself and his energy. As someone else wrote we don’t know when he learned about this tragedy and he did take action. Unlike Bush playing guitar and laughing and not being on the ground for Katrina at the start (until the media went after him for appearing heartless – sound familiar) this president did act. He did not just say &(&%# it Im playing golf.
And if he had stood there wringing his hands the complaints would be as ferocious, what’s wrong with this guy we need a president who is strong and an take it when tragedies occur.
leejcaroll – Obama sends 3 people to the Brown funeral but none to the Ambass. Stevens funeral. What does that tell you?
Paul said: leejcaroll – Obama sends 3 people to the Brown funeral but none to the Ambass. Stevens funeral. What does that tell you?
September 14, 2012 – President Barack Obama and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton attend a funeral service for the four victims at Joint Base Andrews, Maryland. http://www.cnn.com/2013/09/10/world/benghazi-consulate-attack-fast-facts/
President Obama presided over a heartbreaking homecoming Friday as the bodies of the slain U.S. ambassador to Libya and three other American heroes were returned home.
The flag-draped caskets bearing the bodies of Ambassador Chris Stevens, Tyrone Woods, Sean Smith and Glen Doherty were carried by a Marine honor guard to the haunting strains of a military band playing “Nearer My God to Thee.”
“Their sacrifice will never be forgotten,” Obama told the 200 mourners gathered in an open hangar at Andrews Air Force Base. “The flag they served under now carries them home.”
http://www.nydailynews.com/news/world/president-obama-hilary-clinton-joe-biden-mourn-relatives-ceremony-fallen-diplomats-bodies-home-u-s-article-1.1159761#ixzz3CllLIZRV
But t hats okay Paul, keep repeating Fox and the right’s spin and lies, exaggerations and distortions.,
leejcaroll – you do know the difference between a funeral and a homecoming?
Did it bother you when Bush played guitar while people were drowning. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/david-corn/hurricane-katrina-and-bus_b_6618.html
Who holds the record for the most presidential vacation time?
Thursday’s episode of In Play, The Washington Post’s new political analysis show hosted by Chris Cillizza of The Fix and Jackie Kucinich, revealed the answer: President George W. Bush. During his two terms, Bush took 879 vacation days, which included 77 total trips to his Crawford, Tex., ranch. Nine of those trips were taken in his first year as president.
While Bush holds the record for the longest modern presidential vacation for his five-week recess in 2005 in Crawford, the all-time record holder is John Adams who took eight months off in 1799.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/post-politics/wp/2013/08/09/watch-which-u-s-president-took-the-most-vacation-time/
Paul please don’t let facts get in your way.
My problem is that he spends so much time going to, golfing, and coming back, plus all the vacations and fund-raisers, that I am not sure he actually has time to do the job we are over paying him for.
“It is said that as many days as there are in the whole journey, so many are the men and horses that stand along the road, each horse and man at the interval of a day’s journey; and these are stayed neither by snow nor rain nor heat nor darkness from accomplishing their appointed course with all speed. “ Herodotus
He was just acting out his part in the theater of the absurd.
In the work smarter, not harder school of thought (though one hopes our President will work smarter and harder), I can forgive our President playing golf if he makes correct leadership decisions.
What’s far more worrisome than Obama playing golf is that the consequences were apparent early on from Obama’s errors in leaving Iraq too early in the peace-building process and the disintegration of the surrounding Arab Spring with Obama’s feckless ‘lead from behind’ approach.
The Ambassador Stevens killing in 2012, for example, was a clear indicator that Obama’s approach of aiding and abetting the anti-government forces for regime change but then avoiding the post-war peace-building was an error with compounding harms.
That said, on that level of difficulty of winning war and building peace, it’s normal for a plan not to work perfectly upon initial application. That’s simply the nature of geopolitical competition. Even corrective action often takes several tries. In post-Saddam Iraq, for example, the terrorists initially overwhelmed our initial peace operations and our first fixes until we got right and won with the Petraeus-led Counterinsurgency “Surge” and Anbar Awakening.
Obama should have stayed the course from Bush to begin with in order to continue our peace-building. But Obama’s worse fault than giving away the progressing peace we had earned under Bush was that Obama declined to even try fixing his errors.after they were exposed by events such as the Stevens killing.
Never mind the President’s Daily Brief – the progress of ISIS in Syria and its crossover into Iraq have been open-source news for at least a year. When ISIS took Fallujah in January that should have been a clarion call and red line. Yet even then, Obama allowed the problem to continue to worsen without trying to take corrective action.
It’s better late than never for corrective action, but Obama should have changed course a long time ago to prevent the problem reaching its current condition.
A war-time President who does his job correctly, like Bush, can be forgiven for playing golf. A war-time President who does his job incorrectly, like Obama, deserves more criticism.
Come on… Really… People get a life…
Perhaps the fundamental problem is being ignored: Truth and integrity are simply not compatible with political hack (i.e., a president of the USA, a senator, a rep, a governor). Period. In essence, an honest man canNOT be elected to the highest office in the land. Yet so many citizens canNOT grasp that fact. How anybody can love and support a liar is beyond me.
What a ‘Putz’ our President is……………..
Justice, I think what you are saying is not very different than what president W Bush used to say, go to malls to show terrorists they have failed. I still do not get it why people think that there are only two options, either to become impaired and cry , or to fist bump and laugh when a tragic event has just happened. We are dealing with the barbarians who had another journalist at the time, so I just do not understand how a behavior like that was justified…isn’t it a big victory for the terrorists that now we cannot even experience and regulate genuine emotions and express appropriate behaviors? My belief is that if a person cannot experience true emotions and then regulate them, he cannot do effective problem solving, or process the incoming data well to be able to make good decisions. Those are just my 2 cents, I may be totally incorrect and you maybe totally correct.
I guess he’ll “beheading” to the golf course
oJRB,Joan Rivers would have loved that one.
Wow, his response to the beheading was not to go and play golf. He made a statement about it and carried on. What did you do when you heard about this awful murder? Did you go to church to pray, turn off your television, close your shades. I bet not. You carried on with your life. I have a lot of problems with Obama but his playing golf isn’t one of them.
Terrorists want to see us fall apart, flail around and be unable to function. We should never give them what they want. We have already given away our rights as citizens. We should not allow them to rule the rest of our lives.
MIke, what I have said has nothing to do with golf. I care less about what he wears or what skin color he has. My problem is with the neurocircuitry that prevents him to experience appropriate emotions and channel them into appropriate behaviors. I do not believe he can do anything about it, and neither can we, except to hope that we have a better neurocircuitry in the WH next time.
wow:
My point is simply this; for almost six years I have listened to daily and relentless criticisms of this president, including most recently objections to his choice of suits. He spoke publicly about the beheading and personally contacted the family to express his condolences. No more should have been expected. However, we live in a society where people think it important to tweet what they had for breakfast and where every waking moment must be justified to someone. That someone should find it newsworthy to even photograph the President during a routine game of golf is a testament to our mindless, pervasive voyeurism.
MIke, I am speechless at your comment,
wow:
As far as I can determine, not a single golf course in the United States closed in response to the beheading.
wow, The real problem is people like you who go on nothing but feelings and toss rational thinking to the wind. You fail to make any rational case for your comments as shown by the inability to respond with any reasoning to objections to your objections to Obama’s response. At military funerals, it is the tradition for the band to play a cheerful tune as the troops march away from the grave. I guess that would be verboten to your view. It must show a similar disrespect for the departed and an inability to have emotions.
A more contemptible kind of official is Gen Patton who during the eviction of the Bonus Marchers, saw the man who literally saved his life in WWI, and ordered his troops to keep that man away from him. That is the kind of person we do NOT need as a leader or politician.
I know Randy, you have stated that several times and as I have said before , I do not think you will understand what I have expressed here, so how about calling a truce? To be honest I feel sorry for this president at some level, as not having the ability to experience emotions and translating them into appropriate behaviors can cause more problems for him than he would encountered otherwise.
Justice holmes, do you think that it is possible that one can have neither the fist bumping or self isolation, as a response? I hate to disappoint you, but there are several other genuine and sophisticated responses that a president could have given who had genuinely NOT felt like thoroughly enjoying himself at that occasion. I actually don’t want him to have pretended anything other than his genuine self and he showed that , I just wish he had a different but genuine response that would have shown a person who can have advanced human emotions and still regulate them.
wow, once again you blast Obama for not showing emotion, yet refuse to say what or where he should have done or gone. THUS your criticism is STILL BS.
I am so sick of the apologizing. Obama seems to be incapable of doing anything that people won’t criticize and then he is incapable of just taking the criticism and moving on. Apologizing is a very bad idea, very bad. It shows a terrible weakness that plays out in how he governs. He needs to get a spine!
I would like to see some Democrats including Obama take a stand or engage in an activity that they didn’t back away from at the hint of controversy. Good grief, if the oresident is supposed to go into seclusion with every tragedy (the death of the journalist was a tradgedy for his family, an attack on us all and a murder committed by the thugs who did it) he would be locked in the WH 24/7.
Olly, I am not even going to respond to Randy, as he just cannot see that it is not a matter of what he should have done, its a matter of character that can enjoy golf , as he did, after having heard the decapitation of a human being.
” get real and tell us what he should have done when he was on vacation.”
Randyjet,
6 years into a Presidency and the closest you all can get to admitting he was wrong is by asking what right looks like. It’s far too late in the game to be looking for character advice.
It is too late in the game for you to have any credibility as being a rational being since you refuse to say what you think he should have done instead. The only thing that matters is name calling and alleging all kinds of motives.