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Can you imagine the liberal outrage if a Republican called a prominent Dem candidate "Chauncey Gardiner," the simple soul from the Peter Sellers film Being There? The cries of racism might well cost such a hapless Republican his job. But don't expect James Carville to pay any price. On today's With All Due Respect, Carville said that a frustrated Bush "can't believe that Chauncey Gardiner [laughs] and Trump and all these people are running ahead of him." Given that Carson and Trump are the two front-runners, and that Carson, while brilliant, is soft-spoken, there would seem little doubt that Carville...

The most powerful man in the world sure seems to get a lot of information about what's going on inside his administration from outside news reports. The latest example was President Obama saying in an interview aired over the weekend that he learned of his former secretary of state's personal email use from the media.

Aboard Air Force One, White House Press Secretary Josh Earnest indicates that President Obama probably found out about the Hillary Clinton email scandal from the media. Earnest told reporters traveling with the president that he wouldn’t be surprised if Obama first learned about Clinton’s homebrew server this week, according to the pool report.

In scandal after scandal in the Obama administration, President Obama has said he didn’t know about the problems until he heard it on the news. But the president changed his tune about his supposed ignorance at a Democratic fundraiser near Seattle on Tuesday night. Mr. Obama told supporters that he doesn’t watch the news because, “Whatever they’re reporting about, usually I know.” That contrasts with the explanations that the president and his aides have given from scandals in the past few years ranging from long wait times and deaths at the VA, to the IRS targeting tea party groups, to...

WASHINGTON — President Obama had to laugh. He had just been asked how he deals with criticism, and something about the question just struck him as funny. Maybe it is because criticism is one thing he sees no shortage of these days. Addressing an audience largely made up of African-American boys and young men, Mr. Obama turned serious and gave a long, thoughtful answer about how, over the years, he has learned to focus on what is important to him and keep fixed on “the north star that steers you” no matter what others may say. “And then I just...

“All I know is just what I read in the papers, and that’s an alibi for my ignorance.”— Will Rogers Has there ever been a president in the history of America who knew less than President Obama? With each new crisis and scandal, Mr. Obama tells Americans that he just didn’t know. He didn’t know the Veterans Administration was letting America’s veterans languish and die unattended — he learned about it in the newspaper. He didn’t know the Justice Department was trolling phone records of members of the U.S. media. He didn’t know the ATF was running guns into Mexico;...

President Obama seems to be relying heavily on the Fourth Estate to uncover internal government scandals. This video montage shows the Obama Administration claiming they knew nothing about scandals such as Fast and Furious and the Internal Revenue Service targeting until they were leaked by news outlets.

Obama knows nothing, sees nothing, and hears nothing unless his lapdogs bark, then his ears perk up. Not exactly using a hunting dog to flush out the truth, is he? Kind of reminds me of that famous Will Rogers quote: “All I know is just what I read in the papers, and that’s an alibi for my ignorance.” The head of a government that has the most sophisticated spying apparatus ever created can monitor who we talk to, what we talk about, how many twinkies our kids eat and the calories we consume, where we travel, etc. etc., yet announces...

Today, White House Press Secretary Jay Carney sought to partially walk back his statement yesterday in which he said President Obama learned about the growing scandal at the Veterans Administration by watching a report on the topic on CNN. After realizing just how bad that sounded, Carney returned to the daily briefing with the White House press corps today to say that his statement was being misinterpreted. According to Carney, what he really meant to say was that the president had only heard of the “specific allegations” about misconduct at VA hospitals by watching television. But, he insisted, the president...

But of course:

President Barack Obama first learned of the scandal involving Department of Veterans Affairs hospital administrators concealing the true wait times vets faced in the press, according to a claim made by White House Press Sec. Jay Carney on Monday. While the president may have not been aware of the falsified wait lists, however, reports indicate that his administration was informed of excessive wait times at the VA as early as 2008. Obama even campaigned on the issue of VA waiting lists in 2007. “When was the president first made aware of these problems?” CNN reporter Jim Acosta asked. “These fraudulent

Rip Van Obama President Obama went into a deep slumber in December. When he woke up this January, he found himself back even in the polls, with neither a press conference nor another overhyped presidential televised address to be heard. Sleep, quiet, and solitude — all that appears wiser than campaigning, visibility, and speaking, both for Obama and Americans. In short, the president has really hit on something: an Obama going into a Rip Van Winkle somnolent state might just mean waking up again as president. If conservatives once alleged that Obama got elected as Being There’s Chauncey Gardiner —...

In Tucson, on Wednesday evening, we saw President Barack Obama in his full Chauncey Gardiner mode. After the drubbing of November 2010, Obama's handlers have come to understand that Obama does best when, like Chauncey, he says nothing at all. Chauncey Gardiner, the reader may recall, is the protagonist of Jerzy Kosinski's 1971 prescient satire, Being There, which was later made into a movie of the same name, co-scripted by Kosinski. As the plot goes, Chance the Gardener, a sheltered simpleton, finds himself thrust into the world upon the death oh his wealthy protector, his name now misinterpreted as "Chauncey...

Kathleen Parker is an incurable Liberal suck-up but her latest column Voters elevate the ordinary has an inkling of what happened to the United States. Kathleen, poor thing, has a good thought, but when she takes it out to play, she lets it get away from her. It’s all about “Being There,”... According to Parker, Chauncey Gardiner, the genial but retarded gardener from “Being There” is Alvin Green. And that’s the point at which Parker’s though begins to run off. Alvin Green, the man who won the nomination to be the Democrat Senate candidate from South Carolina, who didn’t campaign...