A little help from your friends

Poor Bamster. He seems to be getting a great deal of criticism lately after pushing the envelop of his foreign policy. Coincidentally, I was perusing the Lifehacker site and saw this article where the experts addressed the question "How can I gracefully back out of an obligation?" I immediately thought that I could look that over and and see if it had any relevance to poor Barry's predicament. I mean once he drew that 'red line' he was kinda caught in his own rhetoric in a position that he couldn't back out of.

So the article opens by sort of dodging the question, which is kinda metaphorically the Bamster's whole leadership style. Here's what it said:

You don't always have to back out of too many obligations. Sometimes you only need to re-prioritize your time and set new deadlines where you can.

Holy Crap! It's like that little walk that he took with his chief of staff was accompanied by a perusal of this article.  Delay the bombing for a while and maybe the whole thing will go away. But wait you say - he made that decision 4 days ago and the Lifehacker article only came out yesterday. Heh - right... Like that is a problem for the guy that has the resources of the NSA at his beck and call.

The article follows up that concept of 're-prioritizing' by describing methods for accomplishing that. Point one is:

Take a vacation day (or two) from work

Done! Time to call up Reggie Love and hit the links! Next is:

Extend the <conflicting obligation> deadline. 

 Then goes on to explain that sometimes people miss deadlines. For the guy who's administration is late on everything (responding to congressional inquiries, Obamacare implementation, budgets), this is really not a problem. He can soo do this. The next advice bullet is a bit more problematic:

Cut your favors in half. While it sucks to prioritize work over your friends, sometimes you have to do that. 

However, he is quite adept at throwing people under the bus, so cutting back on favors to the Al Qaeda fighters may be the right move. After all, they should have seen it coming after the last little misstep with the MB guys in Egypt.

The article then goes on to give advice on what to do if you can't re-prioritize. Their first bullet:

  When re-prioritizing your time can't solve the problem and you need to back out of an obligation, you need to do so gracefully and, in many cases, have a plan

Humm. Not quite sure how this applies to this situation. Planning is really hard work. I am thinking that Barry should probably just skip over  this part of the article. Grace and planning is not really his strong suite. But he should think about this very cosignate point:

You don't necessarily need to succeed in helping a friend, but your intentions will go a long way when you have to bow out.

See intentions are everything with Barry. Follow through is not nearly as important. I'm sure his Al Qaeda buddies will understand.

Finally there is this wrap up point in the article:

We can't always manage our time perfectly, so pay attention to the times when you screwed up so you can avoid making the same errors in the future

I am thinking this might be kinda wasted on Barry, but he seems like a smart guy, so perhaps not. I guess time will tell.