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October 27th, 2010 10:01 pm
Obama’s Intellectual Shortcomings Revealed
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For reasons surpassing understanding, the White House seems to have decided that the immediate run-up to a catastrophic mid-term election is the time for a series of insider press portraits of an asphyxiating presidency. The latest such installment comes in a profile of White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs in the new issue of GQ. Buried among many gems in the piece is this new nugget about President Obama’s initial reaction to the Gulf Oil Spill:

No sooner had Obama publicly beheaded McChrystal that Wednesday than a fresh catastrophe crossed Gibbs’s desk: An undersea robotic vehicle in the Gulf had dislodged the containment cap on the BP well. Until the lid was reattached eleven hours later, a new torrent of oil spilled into the sea. Gibbs went back into the Oval to give Obama the news.

The president stared at Gibbs, stunned. “Well, why did it do that?” he demanded.

“Sir, we’re trying to find that out.”

“Gibbs,” Obama said, “your job the rest of the day is to make sure that one of those vehicles doesn’t do that again.”

Come again? Would that be the President of the United States telling his Press Secretary to take the lead on a underwater engineering project so complex that it befuddled the President’s Nobel laureate Secretary of Energy? What was Gibbs supposed to do? Draft an aggressive press release prohibiting any further disasters? We know this is the man who promised to stem the ocean’s rising tides, but perhaps Obama was taking the whole King Canute shtick a little too seriously.

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