Obama press conference: I don’t think there’s any debate in this country that when you have four Americans killed, that’s a problem

8 months since the last presser, and he really didn’t have much to say.

On Petraeus: “By his own assessment, he did not meet the standards that he felt were necessary as the director of CIA with respect to this personal matter that he is now dealing with with his family and with his wife. And it’s on that basis that he tendered his resignation, and it’s on that basis that I accepted it.” Obama is here avoiding saying whether he would have asked for Col. Combover’s resignation. As for those “standards,” and other discussion of Col. C “failing to live up to his own Code,” since the affair took place some time ago and he only resigned when it came out, the Petraeus Code is clearly Don’t Get Caught.

He calls the latest Syrian umbrella group “a legitimate representative of the aspirations of the Syrian people.” Nice that someone found the legitimacy that Assad lost – it’s always in the last place you look.

But we won’t be recognizing them as government-in-exile or arming them (at least not openly): “And you know, one of the things that we have to be on guard about, particularly when we start talking about arming opposition figures, is that we’re not indirectly putting arms in the hands of folks who would do Americans harm or do Israelis harm”. Did you notice what group he conspicuously omitted from that list? Syrians. If intra-Syrian ethnic/sectarian/factional violence is a factor in his decisionmaking process, it seems to have slipped his mind here.

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