Has an empty chair been getting 56.2 percent of the president's intelligence briefings?
In light of the news that fatal attacks on U.S. diplomats in Benghazi, Libya, may well have been pre-planned by al Qaeda operatives, it would behoove the media to scrutinize just how infrequently President Obama sits in on his daily intelligence briefings. As Marc Thiessen noted in an op-ed in Sunday, September 10 edition of the Washington Post, President Obama sat in on his Presidential Daily Brief (PDB) a mere 536 times out of his first 1,225 days in office. That's a mere 43.8 percent of the time. "By contrast, Obama’s predecessor, George W. Bush almost never missed his daily intelligence meeting," the American Enterprise Institute fellow noted.
In an "exclusive" this morning, Wynton Hall of Breitbart.com's Big Peace noted that the president last attended a PDB on September 5:
According to the White House calendar, there is no public record of President Barack Obama attending his daily intelligence briefing--known as the Presidential Daily Brief (PDB)--in the week leading up to the attacks on the U.S. embassy in Cairo and the murder of U.S. Libyan Ambassador Chris Stevens and three American members of his staff:
9/6/2012- http://www.whitehouse.gov/schedule/president/2012-09-06
9/7/2012- http://www.whitehouse.gov/schedule/president/2012-09-07
9/8/2012- http://www.whitehouse.gov/schedule/president/2012-09-08
9/9/2012- http://www.whitehouse.gov/schedule/president/2012-09-09
9/10/2012- http://www.whitehouse.gov/schedule/president/2012-09-10
9/11/2012- http://www.whitehouse.gov/schedule/president/2012-09-11
The last time prior to the slayings that the White House calendar publicly confirms Mr. Obama attending his daily intelligence briefing was September 5th. (The White House did not provide an official public calendar for September 8-10.) Mr. Obama and Vice President Joe Biden met with Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta at 5:00 p.m. yesterday.
When Obama ran for the presidency, he was ridiculed by conservatives for, among other things, his for penchant for voting "present" as a state and federal legislator. Now the criticism of President Obama might more appropriately be that he's voting "absent."
On a somewhat related matter, President Obama has also been absent from his "Jobs council," another fact you can expect the liberal media to downplay, if not ignore altogether, in the remaining eight weeks until the election.
Photo illustration by Media Research Center graphic designer Dyana Hua.
