The Best POTUS Of Their Lifetimes

Americans rank Barack Obama as best president of their lifetimes: Poll - ABC News - via @ABC abcn.ws/2uqE8mP

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Lisa Guerrero 💃🏽 (@4lisaguerrero) July 12, 2019

The Michelle Magic

Watch the amazing moment @MichelleObama surprises a dance class at her former high school. Obama visited the class… twitter.com/i/web/status/1…

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20/20 (@ABC2020) November 12, 2018

A Superior Mind

I think Trump got through the whole repeal fight w/o explaining how the bill worked. Compare to any Obama interview. https://t.co/Zx5bZgZ7d5

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Dave Weigel (@daveweigel) August 01, 2017

Substance + Style

President Obama’s This Week Interview

Repeat After Me: There Is No Liberal Media

The previous President, after the attacks of 9/11, engineered a war with a state which, though abysmal to its own people, had had no direct or indirect link with any terror attack on the United States. It was, if anything, a mortal enemy of the group which carried out the attacks, as that group saw the ruling regime as corrupt and un-Islamic. As the history of that war is being written, the regime sought to stave off war, willing to give the previous President anything he wanted, save for the regime’s destruction. Of course, the regime as it existed stood in the way of the grand plan to remake the Middle East; its destruction, not its containment, was the goal. Anything short of political—and literal—suicide would not suit the ultimate purpose. So the country and the world were lied into a war, which cost nearly 5,000 American lives, and hundreds of thousands of Iraqi deaths; a war which was supposed to last a few weeks and pay for itself instead dragged on for nearly a decade, costing over $1 trillion. And the Middle East, far from being remade into a collection of benevolent American satrapies, teetered on the edge of all-out war for the eight years of the George W. Bush administration.

That President, however, was never asked to apologize for the disaster he had wrought. And if ever he had been asked to apologize in a face-to-face interview, he never offered one: no apology for the countless dead, for the treasure wasted, for the lives destroyed. It’s just not the done thing.

Well, it used to not be the done thing.

A Trip Down Memory Lane

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President Obama on This Week

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Full transcript here

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As UT picked out, the line:

“I welcome [Mr Putin] being involved. I welcome him saying, “I will take responsibility for pushing my client, the Assad regime, to deal with these chemical weapons”.”

Too good.

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Rise and Shine

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Saturday: The President has no public events scheduled

Sunday:

8:0 AM The President departs the White House

9:50: Arrives Atlanta, Georgia

11:0: Attends Morehouse College commencement and delivers the commencement speech

2:10: Delivers remarks at a DSCC event at The Arthur M. Blank Family Foundation, Atlanta

3:10: Departs Atlanta

4:55: Arrives the White House

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(Photo: Pete Souza, 2009)

The Week Ahead:

Monday: The President will welcome President Thein Sein of Myanmar to the White House. Since President Obama’s historic trip to Rangoon last November, the United States has continued to advocate for continued progress on reform by President Thein Sein’s government, in close cooperation with Aung San Suu Kyi, civil society leaders, and the international community.

Tuesday: Will attend meetings at the White House.

Wednesday: Will attend meetings at the White House, and in the evening, as part of their “In Performance at the White House” series, the President and the First Lady will host a concert honoring singer-songwriter Carole King, who will be awarded the 2013 Library of Congress Gershwin Prize for Popular Song.

Thursday: Will attend meetings at the White House.

Friday: Will travel to Annapolis, Maryland, to deliver the commencement address at the U.S. Naval Academy.

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This week started with Three! Huge! Scandals! It ends with #umbrellagate. Well played, Mr. President. Well played.

— Jeff Fecke (@jkfecke) May 17, 2013

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Media Matters: ABC News & The Whitewater Tactics At The Center Of The Scandal Machine

…. ABC’s flawed reporting on the emails, based on selective leaks, has led to questions about reporter Jonathan Karl’s future, vividly demonstrating the consequences of this type of press manipulation. But whether fellow journalists – and viewers – will demand accountability from Karl remains to be seen.

It’s the Whitewater experience, which GOP leaders are reportedly skittish of repeating, that provides a blueprint for accountability over this type of press manipulation.

…. Will the media, which once again saw one of their own get burned by relying on selective leaks in furtherance of a hunting of a president, demand accountability this time?

Full post here

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The more you look at this report, the more (literally) incredible it is – and thrown in, for good measure, edits of Jay Carney (from 0:18) to make him look like a bumbling fool. Truly, Fox out-Foxed by ABC.

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Michael Tomasky: Will ABC Finger the Liar?

….. ABC News, if you ask me, has had a worse week than Obama, not that as many people are paying attention. But consider. CNN and Jake Tapper got the actual emails, proving beyond a doubt that ABC and Karl were wrong. And on CBS, Scott Pelley and Major Garrett took the unheard of step of basically calling news gatherers at a fellow network liars.

…. The record up to today suggests that the government is a good measure more trustworthy than ABC News–and, don’t forget, than whoever it was (surely a GOP source of some kind) who lied to Karl in the first place.

Full post here

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More at Mediaite

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Mediaite: Does Jon Karl Have The Juice To Survive Benghazi Email Controversy?

….. Even the best reporter can get played by a source with an ax to grind, but by presenting that source’s misinformation as a series of direct quotes from emails that the source made up, Jonathan Karl bought and paid for the consequences, and so did ABC News. They both owe their viewers, and this White House, an apology.

Full post here

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In light of current events, an interesting read from 2011:

See here

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Rise and Shine

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Today:

11:0: The President departs the White House

11:25: Arrives Baltimore, Maryland

11:35: Visits an Elementary School

1:05: Tours Ellicott Dredges (which manufactures innovative dredges and dredge equipment being sold for infrastructure projects across the country and around the world)

1:20: Delivers remarks

2:15: Visits a community center

3:0: Departs Baltimore

3:25: Arrives the White House

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Kevin Drum (Mother Jones): It’s Official: Those Bogus Email Leaks Came From Republicans

It’s not as if we didn’t know this already, but Major Garrett made it official: last week’s leaks that misquoted the Benghazi emails came directly from Republicans….

So here’s what happened. Republicans in Congress saw copies of these emails two months ago and did nothing with them. It was obvious that they showed little more than routine interagency haggling. Then someone got the bright idea of leaking two isolated tidbits and mischaracterizing them in an effort to make the State Department look bad…..

But it was typical GOP overreach. To their surprise, the White House took Republicans up on their demand to make the entire email chain public, thus making it clear to the press that they had been burned. And now reporters are letting us all know who was behind it.

More here

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Steve Benen: Whether or not an issue is a “scandal” tends to be a subjective question — one voter’s world-changing controversy may be another voter’s meaningless distraction. Indeed, the Beltway has spent a week telling the nation that the White House is engulfed in three ongoing scandals, though many of us suspect this analysis is deeply flawed.

But if we’re going to talk about real political scandals, can we at least have a conversation about Republicans lying to reporters about Benghazi?

More here

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Jeffrey Goldberg (Bloomberg): So it turns out that Susan Rice, the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations and, before a group of leading Senate Republicans decided that she was evil incarnate, a top contender to replace Hillary Clinton as secretary of state, had nothing to do with formulating the White House’s response to the fatal attacks last year at the American diplomatic mission in Benghazi, Libya.

…. Republican Senators Lindsey Graham and John McCain, among others, argued for weeks that Rice was a crucial cog in a huge conspiracy to hide the facts of Benghazi from the American people….

…. I don’t expect that Graham will apologize to Rice for accusing her of engaging in an enormous conspiracy, when all she seems to have done is take the consensus of several government agencies and present it publicly. But you would hope Graham would think twice before threatening again to stop her advancement in government.

Full post here

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