Barack Obama's Behind

From January to July of this year, over 52,000 unaccompanied children and 39,000 women with children have been apprehended at the south Texas border (http://dailysignal.com/).  That number, then, only summarizes those counted at one Mexico-United States border and does not begin to describe how many have crossed undetected or at other Mexico-United States borders.

Does the border crisis qualify as one that demands swift, decisive governance or is this a political issue wherein electioneering is front and center?  Should Barack Obama and his White House decide which actions will yield them the most November 2014 votes or which actions will be in the best interests of our country?  As you will read below, even Obama-loving NBC News personnel question the President’s handling of the problem and his motivations for what he has and has not done.

Consider NBCs July 2, 2014 Meet the Press exchanges between David Gregory, moderator of the show, and Chuck Todd, NBCs Chief White House Correspondent and NBC News political director, as they discuss the aforementioned issues.

Gregory:  So Chuck, from Secretary Johnson [United States Homeland Security Secretary Jeh Johnson], I think an ambiguous [emphasis added] response to what they're going to do [emphasis added] and how exactly we got here [emphasis added].

Todd:  It's been that way.  It was that way Thursday in the White House briefing, when you could not get a straight answer out of the administration [emphasis added].  You couldn't get them to say should the President's image [emphasis added] be used to send this message in Central America, for instance.

Gregory:  Yeah.

Todd:  To send the message, "Hey, don't send your kids here, this isn't going to happen." There was ambiguity in his answer to you about is there going to be an attempt to increase-- you want the ability to increase the amount of deportations. They've been afraid to say that. And it's the politics of this, right?

Gregory:  Right.

Todd:  You know, we have immigration law conflation going on here.  This crisis is separate from the immigration issue that's been debated here in Washington.  But it's been conflated, obviously, back and forth.  And think part of the problem is you have an administration that, on one hand, has immigrant rights groups wanting them to expand some of the executive orders, including maybe Dreamers, this DACA thing, Dreamers for the Parents.  And in exchange, they know politically, in order to get away with that [emphasis added], they do have to increase--

Gregory:  Right.

Todd:  …  the deportations, but they don't want to say it.

Many Democrats, too, are frustrated with the me-first, politicize-everything President.  Obama refused to go to the Mexican border to see the illegal child immigrant problem firsthand because he believed that doing so would make him more overtly responsible for the catastrophe since his image there would be publicized in photos and news footage.  Instead, the President went to a Colorado fundraiser where he orchestrated his own photo-op showing himself having a beer* while playing pool with multi-millionaire Democrat state governor, John Hickenlooper.  In response,  Texas Democrat Representative Henry Cuellar complained: "He [Barack Obama] can get on Air Force One, be there [at the Mexican border] in a half an hour ... right after he finishes his fundraising in Texas…  One of the things he needs to do is roll up his sleeves, go down there to the border, talk to the community leaders there."       

But, of course, Obama did not go to the border as requested.  

No matter how dire the situation, the President and his policy of leading from behind is not “thoughtful reflection” as Obama lovers would have us believe.  No.  Barack Obama is mostly concerned with looking good and with milking crises for all they are worth; that is why he is so late in reacting to each and every catastrophe. 

Leading from behind is a deliberate strategy to delay, leak information about this or that approach to a crisis, wait to see how popular which approaches are with whom, and then proceed with the option that is most politically advantageous to Barack Obama’s image and political ambitions.  Regardless of the issue-Central American children flooding our borders, the slaughter of Syrian citizens, the annexation of Crimea, Iranian nuclear weapons ambitions, and so forth-Obama always has followed the maxim of his former White House chief of staff, Rahm Emanuel, who said, "You never want a serious crisis to go to waste."

Barack Obama has tried to blame the Central American children crisis on the fact that the illegal immigrants are trying to escape their lethally dangerous communities.  Perhaps the President once again can call upon Rahm Emanual for guidance.  You see, Emanuel, now mayor of Barack's home town of Chicago, is uniquely qualified to advise the President about a violence crisis.  Quoting The Chicago Tribune, the July 4, 2014 weekend in Chicago unfolded as follows: 

In all, at least 82 people were shot, 14 of them fatally, since Thursday afternoon when two woman were shot as they sat outside a two-flat within a block of Garfield Park.

Five of the people were shot by police over 36 hours on Friday and Saturday, including two boys 14 and 16 who were killed when they allegedly refused to drop their guns.

Many of the long weekend's shootings were on the South Side, clustered in the Englewood, Roseland, Gresham and West Pullman neighborhoods that rank among the most violent in the city.

The victims ranged from the 14-year-boy shot by police in the Old Irving Park neighborhood to a 66-year-old woman grazed in the head as she walked up the steps of her porch on the Far South Side.  Most victims were in their late teens and 20s.

Each night of the long holiday weekend, at least a dozen people were shot in the greatest burst of gun violence Chicago has seen this year.

• From Thursday night into Friday, three people were killed and 10 others wounded. An attack outside a West Englewood salon left two men dead and an East Garfield Park shooting took the life of a 21-year-old woman.

• From Friday afternoon into Saturday, 20 people were shot, one fatally. The man who died had been flashing gang signs in a parking lot in the Clearing neighborhood when someone told him to stop. When the man didn’t, he was shot, police said.

• From Saturday night into Sunday morning, four people were killed and another 10 wounded.

• The bloodiest stretch of the weekend was a 13-hour period between 2:30 p.m. Sunday and 3:30 a.m. Monday when four people were killed and at least another 26 wounded, many of them in critical condition. And the most chaotic scene was in South Chicago, where three people were wounded during a running gun battle.

Should the Central American refugee children be sent to Barack’s home town of Chicago where they will be safe?  Should Barack Obama’s leading from behind presidential approach to America and to the world be applied by United States mayors to enable them to manage our nation’s dysfunctional inner-cities as successfully as his advisor, Rahm Emanual, is managing Chicago?

*  P.S., While Barack was in the bar a patron asked if he wanted a “hit” of the patron’s marijuana cigarette.  Apparently, that patron was aware of Obama’s drug-taking history and/or of Obama’s joke last week about crack cocaine being in the White House pastry.