About the Right Wing Myth That Obama ‘Skips Daily Intel Briefings’
Before it attacked one of our besieged embassies over a statement it released, team Romneybot tried to stir up controversy about Obama’s attendence at daily intelligence briefings.
Wash Post writer Dana Milbank explains:
About the same time, the Republican National Committee and prominent Republicans such as Dick Cheney and John McCain threw another faulty bit of plumbing at Obama: that the president ‘does not attend his daily intelligence meeting’ more than half the time, in contrast to George W. Bush, who ‘almost never missed his daily intelligence meeting.’ This claim was the work of former Bush speechwriter Marc Thiessen, who writes a weekly online column for The Washington Post.
In reality, Obama didn’t ‘attend’ these meetings, because there were no meetings to attend: The oral briefings had been mostly replaced by daily exchanges in which Obama reads the materials and poses written questions and comments to intelligence officials. This is how it was done in the Clinton administration, before Bush decided he would prefer to read less. Bush’s results — Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction, and the failure to find Osama bin Laden — suggest this was not an obvious improvement.
Ouch, that’s gonna leave a mark. The whole column is really good reading about a desperate campaign.