Oh, no — he’s at it again! Twitter, I mean. Three days after defending himself against allegations of mental instability by tweeting that he is “like, really smart,” the president is here to let the world know how smart:
I’m a better speechwriter than my speechwriters. I know more about policies on any particular issue than my policy directors.
It’s the sort of quote the mainstream media would love to sink their teeth into — and would if it were Donald Trump who said it. But the words were uttered by Barack Obama during the run-up to the 2008 election. Remarkably, Brandy X. Lee, the Yale psychiatry professor currently enjoying her Warholian 15 minutes, didn’t sound the alarm over Obama’s mental stability as she has done with Trump over the past year.
Lee and her Democratic pals in Congress were silent again when a report released by the Government Accountability Institute (GAI) in 2014 revealed that Obama had skipped 57.9% of his daily intelligence briefings, known officially as Presidential Daily Briefs (PDB), in the 2,079 days of his presidency up to that point. One of the PDBs his big brain permitted him to ignore was the one prepared by his team the the day after the 2012 Benghazi attacks.
Will this presidential election be the most important in American history?
At least Obama had no delusions about how important daily intelligence briefings are. Speaking to the matter, he said:
It doesn’t matter how smart you are, you have to have the best information possible to make the best decision possible. If you’re not getting [the intelligence community’s] perspective, their detailed perspective, then you are flying blind.
Of course, he shared that insight in 2016 after he was no longer president. In fact it wasn’t intended to be self-deprecating but, rather, as a dig at his successor:
Obama’s weakness in handling the threat of ISIS was such that John R. Schindler, a professor of strategy at the Naval War College and a former National Security Agency intelligence analyst and counterintelligence officer, tweeted in 2015:
Talked 2 an old friend, snr IC official – who said on #ISIS: "If the public knew the truth, Obama would be impeached."
Friend's a Dem, btw.
— John Schindler (@20committee) December 6, 2015
Yet, when asked about his foreign policy bona fides in an interview with “60 Minutes Overtime” (beginning at 1:59 in the video below), he boasted that his achievements in this area lagged behind only three presidents before him: Lincoln, FDR, and Johnson.
Obama’s egotism, inability to learn from mistakes, and all the rest were on display daily for eight years, but somehow no one ever saw fit to question his mental stability. Makes you wonder about their mental stability.
