Samantha Power, President Obama's pick to be America's Ambassador to the United Nations, had previously been in charge of the Atrocities Prevention Board. How did she do in that role?

The Atrocities Prevention Board is another "board" that Obama routinely sets up for the media buzz and then promptly ignores (see the Simpson-Bowles commission on fiscal responsibility and reform, for just one prominent example). Obama grandly announced this particular board over a year ago at the Holocaust Museum in Washington in the wake of reports of atrocities in Syria.

He put in charge of the board his good friend and foreign policy guru, Samantha Power. After all, Power wrote a well-received book on genocide and was wont to self-describe herself (grotesquely) as the "genocide chick".

How well has she performed?

The invaluable Jim Geraghty has a roundup of all the atrocities that have been going on under her and Obama's watch (not that they actually cared to "watch" such atrocities, more likely they averted their eyes).

More tellingly, Geraghty is rightly skeptical that there was any real board formed at all.

He notes:

Oh, and if you're wondering how that Atrocities Prevention Board was working out...

Wanting to ascertain whether the board was actually doing anything to help prevent crimes against humanity, some 60 scholars of genocide studies and human-rights activists from across the globe sent a letter to Samantha Power, then-chair of the board, in December. Power never responded. They sent her a second letter in January, and again received no response.

When Power resigned in late February, they sent a letter to Steven Pomper, who assumed Power's position as senior director for Multilateral Affairs and Human Rights. He, too, never replied. On March 28, a letter was sent to another member of the board, Donald Steinberg, deputy administrator of USAID. Again, no response. In early April the scholars wrote to U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Susan Rice about this situation. To date, she has not responded...

. . . the board does not have a website, a Twitter account or even list email addresses for its main office or its members.

As a friend of mine, let's call him Larry (because that is his real name) noted; maybe they ran out of email addresses with all those fake ones being used by administration officials. There were none left for the APB.

Yesterday, the acerbic liberal (a redundancy) columnist Dana Milbank commented on criticism of Obama he hears from a wide range of foreign leaders:

Obama has some visionary ideas about the United States' role in a changing world. They're articulated in his speeches, penned by deputy national security adviser Ben Rhodes, but there's often a lack of follow-through. That's the first thing journalists often hear from foreign leaders: Where is your president on big issues? Why don't we hear more from him?

Actually, America has heard a great deal from Obama; airy pronouncements (on red lines, on his opinion that Assad must go, the Arab Spring must be promoted, that he does not bluff, that Iran will not get the bomb, he has Israel's back, etc.), but the problem is that they are meaningless and are never followed up with actions. And America's adversaries know this to be a fact.

They are mere words, as Obama himself might say. The Board under Power's "leadership" has done nothing and may not even exist for all intents and purposes.

So the Atrocities Prevention Board is merely 3 words, signifying nothing.

The nothingness that is at the heart of Obama's presidency.