Last time, of course, he was "caught" playing golf, and there was a screaming session. But IIRC, there wasn't anything he could have actually done in that case, other than.. not be playing golf. The whole thing was silly.. what was he meant to do? Sit at home, wringing his hands?

Yeah you're right. I remember a time at an IT development job when the QA servers went down and the team couldn't do any testing. I personally had no authority to fix the QA servers and my boss wasn't scheduled to come in for another few hours (was working a weekend shift). I made sure to talk to everyone on the QA team, apologize and try to work something else out that they could work on so they weren't pissing money away. The point is my boss came in and saw me trying to do SOMETHING, instead of FUCKING NOTHING. I'm sure if he had of come in and saw me playing golf, he would have given me that big shiny promotion.

Maybe you forgot he's the President of an entire fucking country.