I don't think you guys understand how the government works. This program started under Bush Jr in 2002. Do you think he knew? Maybe he had a memo cross his desk once to approve it which he read for 15 minutes, but I doubt it even reached his desk. This shit is so beneath the onus of "what's important to the President" that it would be an indication of poor use of time if he did know. POTUS literally works from 5 am to midnight every day and has like 15 minutes free in that time, he's one guy, he can't know it all, and he has to delegate shit to people who have the authority to make such decisions which aren't that important. And this decision isn't that important. I mean, literally every country spies on leaders of every other country....
...we were just caught.
What is your definition of "running the country"? If you are going to accuse Obama of association, then you have accuse all the senators and house members in the intelligence committees, the heads of the DoD, NSA, CIA, State Department, and the DHS.
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He doesn't solely negotiate; we have diplomats, ambassadors, and ongoing covert operations all over the world.
Originally Posted by High Overlord Saurfangi7-6700 @2.8GHz | Nvidia GTX 960M | 16GB DDR4-2400MHz | 1 TB Toshiba SSD| Dell XPS 15
Its not possible for the president to know everything that is going on in the country. What he needs to know is everything that is important and is necessary for him to do his job. Its not necessary for the president to know that some low level IRS officials are denying tax exemptions from Tea Party groups. It is necessary for the president to know if the leader of the IRS is doing it.
And intelligence sources are also not necessary for the president to know. All he needs to know there is if the sources are reliable. If he was an ex intelligence analyst you could say that he should know so that he can determine if it is reliable but he is not so usually that will just be useless information. In the case of spying on other countries leaders, he should have been told about that since he deals with them all the time. He was probably not told because hes not a spy and would tip off everyone by acting weird when they talk with each other.
Whether or not he finds out about some of these things from CNN, I dont know and for almost all of the things that have happened I have no problem with it because they are generally not at presidential levels of importance. As someone who was in a leadership position, you often dont get told things because your people dont think it is important enough to tell you. It only become important when they no longer have a handle on it and it gets out of control. Then it is necessary for you to fix it because the people under you couldnt
Last edited by Prokne; 2013-10-29 at 08:22 PM.
I think like making decision to be hacking and spying on heads of state of our allies should require a president stamp of approval or at least made aware of
are you aware that the US considered hacking an act of war do you want unelected officials doing something that could lead to a war
Yeah and he doesn't solely bug the phones of foreign leaders, he has people to do that for him, then he has them share that information to get a better outcome.
Unless you just want to believe he is incompetent, in which case wouldn't he be firing the people who were doing this behind his back... oh wait hes not, because they weren't.
When you see someone in a thread making the same canned responses over and over, click their name, click view forum posts, and see if they are a troll. Then don't feed them."Gamer" is not a bad word. I identify as a gamer. When calling out those who persecute and harass, the word you're looking for is "asshole." @_DonAdams
Oh come on people. Do you really expect the president to know 90-100% of what happens in the government...much less the entire country?
Do you have ANY idea what volume of information you are talking about? If the president did nothing but read reports for 18 hours a day, every day, nonstop he probably wouldn't even come near 90% awareness.
I think you have to break it down.
The president should know 90-100% of all the critical things going on. Then probably 50-75% of the serious things, then from there it probably rapidly drops off.
Do you think the president needs to know that there is a pothole in the road 2 miles down the street from you? Because if you are saying 100% of what goes on in this country, that's included.
So...can we try this thread again in reality land please?
I've maintained for quite some time that people drastically overstate how much power the president has. Congress is where a lot of the power lies, and yet people seem to ignore them for all discussion purposes...and unfortunately in the voting booth. I think it's a lot easier for people to focus their dislike on government to a singular very visible person instead of a group of 600+ people that's most people probably can't even name 10 of.
When you see someone in a thread making the same canned responses over and over, click their name, click view forum posts, and see if they are a troll. Then don't feed them."Gamer" is not a bad word. I identify as a gamer. When calling out those who persecute and harass, the word you're looking for is "asshole." @_DonAdams
If the President of the US knows about more than 0.1% of what is going in the country, then he's super human, which he isn't.
He'll get an overview of the important items, then if something crops up that he is needed to know, he'll get more comprehensive information - just like people that head virtually every large organisation in the world have always done.
The system is setup to run without a President, so it doesn't surprise me at all that it does in fact go on without him.