The One Guy Accountable

President Obama at the memorial service for five dead policemen in Dallas:

“We refuse to fund drug treatment and mental health programs.”

Francis Menton responds in the Manhattan Contrarian:

Huh?  You sure wouldn’t get that impression about “drug treatment programs” from reading the National Drug Control Budget from your Office of National Drug Control Policy.  The budget shows federal spending for drug treatment programs at over $12 billion per year and growing by almost $1 billion per year in recent years.

Really, it could not be more insulting to the American people to suggest that somehow they have been less than exceedingly generous in funding “drug treatment and mental health programs.”  If somehow all of these dozens of programs are not succeeding, if they are disorganized and unfocused, if they are trying to do way too many things at once and succeeding at none of them, there is exactly one person to blame, and that is you, President Obama.  That’s what it means to have a unitary executive, as our Constitution provides.  There’s one guy, and he is accountable.  If we elected you to do one thing, it was to spend our money effectively to accomplish the intended goals; and by your own admission you have completely failed in these areas.  By what kind of hubris do you turn around and blame “society” for what is your own personal failure?  “Society” was not in charge of running these programs.  You were!  

Mr. Menton notes the inappropriateness of using the Dallas memorial service for President Obama’s personal advocacy, and then asks,  “… doesn’t the President of the United States know that he himself was given vast resources by the people and charged with responsibility for using those resources to address and solve these problems that he lists?  If there has been failure to solve (or even make progress as to) these problems, how does he come off taking no responsibility at all and instead blaming ‘society’?”

Fmr. prosecutor suing Obama for inciting race war