Guess who appeared disengaged during momentous national security meetings, playing with his BlackBerry and chewing gum?

You only get one guess.

...A close examination of how the Obama administration finds itself at this point — based on interviews with dozens of current and former members of the administration, foreign diplomats and Congressional officials — starts with a deeply ambivalent president who has presided over a far more contentious debate among his advisers than previously known...

...[some insiders] are far more critical [of Obama], saying that the administration’s paralysis left it unprepared for foreseeable events like the Aug. 21 gas attack...

...As one former senior White House official put it, “We spent so much damn time navel gazing, and that’s the tragedy of it..."

...on Aug. 20 he made a comment that would come to haunt him. Though he was determined to keep the American military out of Syria, “a red line for us is we start seeing a whole bunch of chemical weapons moving around or being utilized,” he said at a news conference...

... at the State Department, some officials were fuming about what they felt was a broken process and a lack of strategy... The administration took more than a year to nominate a replacement for Jeffrey D. Feltman, a veteran Arabic-speaking diplomat who had coordinated the State Department’s Middle East policy...

...Even as the debate about arming the rebels took on a new urgency, Mr. Obama rarely voiced strong opinions during senior staff meetings. But current and former officials said his body language was telling: he often appeared impatient or disengaged while listening to the debate, sometimes scrolling through messages on his BlackBerry or slouching and chewing gum...

...The president signed the finding in April, but months went by without any movement on the C.I.A. program. The White House waited to ask Congress for money for the secret mission, further evidence of Mr. Obama’s continued misgivings...

I'm truly shocked -- shocked! -- that a community agitator with no executive experience would treat the job of president as an inconvenience when it didn't involve speechifying and fundraising.


Hat tip: BadBlue News.